Finding an Apartment in Eguisheim

We've settled on Eguisheim for our base while visiting Alsace in July. Now we need to find a place to stay. Here's how we did it.

What type of accommodation?

We like hotels, B&Bs, small inns, apartments, or any other type of accommodation given the right circumstances. For this portion of the trip, the decision is an easy one - apartment. Why? We have two couples traveling together plus a child. With a kid along, it's really, really nice to have a place for them to sleep and nap that is separate from the living area. That means if you go the hotel or B&B route, it's a suite, and that means money. With a second couple a second room is ideal, so even more expensive. In this case, clearly more cost-effective to find an apartment, so that's our goal.

Where to look?

When searching for an apartment, my go-to resources are airbnb.com, homeaway.com, and vrbo.com. Airbnb is really helpful if looking for a place for less than a solid week and in urban areas. Homeaway is useful for week-long vacation rentals in touristy locations. Same thing for vrbo. I'll talk more about these resources as I make use of them. Unfortunately, these mainstays were not very useful when searching for a place in Eguisheim. It's a little too much off the American tourist trail.

This raises a useful conundrum. The easy options are off the table, so how does one proceed? By easy, I mean English-language, straightforward search interface, and enough reputation to be reasonably sure the place you're renting will actually be there. For longer trips, we'll often just stay in a hotel for a week or two and find an apartment in the local classifieds. That's not useful for a 5 night stay, but it does point to an answer: look for local sources of information.

I often start by trying to figure out the phrase in the local language for vacation rental. Even in countries that speak the same language, there can be different terminology, so it sometimes takes some searching. Sometimes just plug in vacation rental to Google translate and you're good to go. Other times it takes looking in a local version of Craigslist or something similar. It usually does not take too much detective work to figure this out. But it helps to do it.

In France, the word appears to be gîte. With that information in hand, just search google. For this trip I happened to find a government tourism website with lots of listings for gîtes - http://www.ot-eguisheim.fr/. Even if foreign language websites don't provide English versions, you can always translate with Google. So that site was useful, and I emailed about 30 possible places through those advertisements. Most of them were renting only for full weeks or were unavailable, so no dice. Just for general France vacation rental searches, I also discovered Gites de France. This is a very useful site for finding properties all over France.

None of the resources I found with multiple property listings were helpful, so I had to turn to the web presence of individual property owners. If one searches for "gites Eguisheim" there are lots of places that provide individual listings, so I started going through those. Finally found Hameau du Eguisheim, a bed and breakfast with two independent cottages also for rent. The owner there was very nice to allow us to rent for five nights when the minimum is typically seven, Saturday to Saturday.

And a quick note on foreign reservations at smaller places. They almost always require a deposit. Usually this is a transfer into a bank account. Don't worry (not too much, anyway) it's standard. As long as you're dealing with a reputable company it should pose no problems. In this case my bank was giving me the runaround on the foreign wire transfer needed, so the owner of Hameau let me use a credit card for the deposit. Again, not normal but really nice!

Where we'll be

Hameau du Eguisheim is right in the heart of Eguisheim. It has parking. The cottage has two bedrooms, each with double bed and single bed. Nicely equipped kitchen, should be plenty of room for the five of us. I love that the owner has been so responsive to my questions and concerns in the lead-up to the reservation. I also am really happy that we'll be able to walk to dozens of restaurants, several bakeries, and a couple of markets.

Oh, and did I mention that the cottage is on the grounds of a winery. Yes, we'll be staying on the grounds of Pierre Henri Ginglinger. And I believe there are more than 30 other wine producers in the village. Again, this is a great argument for being within walking distance of everyplace in town. I very much look forward to stumbling out of the apartment and into wine tasting opportunities.