31. Be Our Houseguest?
How to stay with friends and family on your next trip—without trashing your relationship or their place.
I have definitely slept around.
As a houseguest, that is. In the name of spending time with far-flung friends and family or nabbing a stay in some desirable, often-spendy locale, I have slipped between sandy sheets on a pull-out couch in Nantucket, passed out on innumerable creaky New York City air mattresses (often alongside a cat or two), and holed up in the guest rooms of friends in bustling Barcelona and old-world Prague.
Accept an invitation—or nicely ask—to be someone’s houseguest for a night or a week, and the stay could veer toward comedy, drama or even a thriller. Will my college roommate’s guest bed be too soft? Does Uncle Alvarez’s snarling dog bite people as they sleep? For the love of Buddha, will my hosts serve coffee in the morning, preferably early?
Most of all, will both guest and host feel comfortable and have a pleasant, or at least tolerable, visit? How can you be sure a relationship survives the vagaries of your morning breath and their nighttime “Real Housewives of Wherever” streaming habit?
“It’s about how well you know someone and how well you want to know someone,” says Hilary Robertson, a New York City stylist and author of the book Nomad at Home. She has hosted countless guests at her Connecticut country place in a converted schoolhouse. “The American way of life robs people of human interactions. So if you stay with someone, you’re talking with them, looking at them, and deepening your connection.”
The art of the mooch-cation
In my family, travel was both about visiting a place and staying with people we knew who lived in it. Long road trips from our San Antonio hometown wound up at my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Dwayne’s ranch house in the Ozarks. European vacations usually commenced in England, where my mother Carol would reconnect with—and impose upon the sometimes dusty guest rooms of—chums she met studying abroad at London’s Kings College.
“You must see friends and relatives every year or two, or you won’t remain close,” my mother preached. My parents, Hal and Carol, were both teachers, cash-poor but vacation-time rich. They spent their free summers rambling the U.S. by station wagon or tooling around Europe by train or rental Fiat. If you’d ever met them or were kin, they were probably coming to stay at your place, with two young daughters—me and little Sally—in tow.
My father jokingly called these trips “mooch-cations.” In Yorkshire, Sally and I delighted in the exotic feather beds (and tennis court) of Carol’s old roommate, who had married a lord. Amid the oil wells and pine trees of East Texas, two elderly cousins who seemed to have forgotten the Barger fam was coming stashed us on a steamy, screened-in back porch with saggy wicker sofas. “Sometimes a snake comes in,” they casually mentioned. I didn’t sleep a wink.
8. Avoid a hotel stay from hell
Hotel reservation sites showcase abundant guest ratings, 3-D room tours, and tools letting you sort properties by features from location to pet friendliness. So why does it feel so nightmarish now to book a pleasant stay—and why have so many hotels seen a
Being a guest was a hack and a delight for my parents, a way to show their kids more of the world for less money. My family stayed in hotels and rental houses too. But my best memories of our month-long summer vacations were giggling until dawn in my cousin Karla’s double bed or dreaming that I lived in a Sears bungalow in Chicago just like the one we stayed in with my Dad’s grad-school buddy.
How to be a good guest
Don’t overstay your welcome.
Etiquette TikTok and old-school manners books agree: The first rule of Houseguest Club is to not stay too long. “Three days is a safe bet—I’ve never felt in someone’s way during short visits like that,” says Claire Polders, a Dutch writer and nomad who pens the Substack Wander, Wonder, Write. “Hosts and guests can change their habits temporarily to accommodate one another without much stress, and small annoyances are easily overlooked.”
Set boundaries, and respect those of your host.
Don’t assume that staying with someone means you need to shadow them or do everything they do. They’ll have boundaries set for you (“I don’t wake up before 8 a.m.”), and you can do the same for them. “Be considerate and ask questions,” Polders says. “Where should I put my bags so they’re not in your way? Is it okay if I sit here during the day to work, or does that bother you? Do you hear me practice my Japanese when I keep this door closed? Do you want me to flush the toilet at night, or does the sound wake you up?”
Be sure the host actually wants you to stay.
Confirm that the host is comfortable with your briefly cohabitating with them. Usually this means you’ve been invited. When in doubt, just act like a vampire, and politely ask to come in. Don’t be shocked if you get turned down. “I recently said ‘no’ to a friend’s daughter who wanted to stay with me for an entire week,” says Robertston. “It just wasn’t a convenient time for me at work.”
Don’t stay with people you barely know.
On a college road trip, my mother (call her Carol the Moocher) facilitated me and my then-boyfriend spending the night with her long-lost third cousins in an Oregon mountain town. We showed up late in a snowstorm only to meet a grouchy middle-aged couple who seemed annoyed to see us and even more annoyed that the boyfriend and I were used to sharing a bed. It was an uncomfortable night and an awkward morning—and the last time I stayed with strangers.
Be generous.
Bring a gift, preferably something consumable from where you live. (I have brought Astronaut Ice Cream from the gift shop at the Air & Space Museum here in D.C. or cans of fancy peanuts grown in nearby Virginia. Offer to take your hosts to dinner somewhere nice.
But remember that the real present, if you aren’t a guest from hell, is your spending time with loved ones you don’t often see. “We tend to consider ourselves a burden to hosts (I do at least), but I’m learning that my presence can be a gift,” Polders says. “Others may enjoy my company as much as I enjoy theirs, and the best way for us to spend time together is for me to be in their home.”
I’ll be a houseguest again soon, sleeping on an airbed (beneath an Andy Warhol silkscreen!) in the Tribeca loft of my longtime friend and mentor, JLC. I look forward to museum hopping and shopping with her. But the biggest treat? The two of us gossiping over morning coffee while curled up on her sectional sofa.
Do you have a good or bad story about staying with other people? Or about your own houseguests from hell or heaven? Drop me a line in the comments; your tale might figure in a future column!
Staying with people is definitely a good way to get to know them better. It often leads to closer relationships