How to Stay in a Beagle-Shaped House for Less Than $100 a Night

"Hovelstay" may be terrible name for a travel website startup—it conjures up Silicon Valley's less-than-harmonious relationship who don't make 6-figs straight outta Stanford, andtourists who think it's all such a laugh to be poor. It's a pretty nice travel start-up in execution, though.

Hovelstay aims to connect people—the original idea was to focus explicitly on college students, but due to overwhelming demand, it's now open to anyone traveling—with less conventional places to stay, for cheap. There's no listing on the site that's over $100.

"Every single vacation rental website is luxury this and luxury that, and it's just ridiculous," Hovelstay's founder Michael Bolger told me. He said that "the hovel name was really just sort of a play at downplaying. It's also funny. It's supposed to have a sense of humor about it. I mean why does it have to be so literal, right?"

I was hard pressed to find anything on Hovelstay's site that I'd actually consider "a hovel"—cute, round, little Hobbit houses, a home made out of strawberry guava plants, another that claims to be the "world's biggest beagle-shaped building." None of them seem like hovels at all, in the traditional sense of the word—they've got beds and everything.

"We do have some pretty nice properties people can stay in if they want, but the guarantee of the site is that you're going to find something for less than $99 a night," Bolger said. "The flip side of it is that we have some really cool places that could be construed as a hovel because they're not the traditional or conventional vacation rental, because, you know, it's in Nicaragua and it's a yoga hut by a waterfall and they've got a wood-burning pizza oven."

It sounds like that yoga next to a waterfall with a wood-burning pizza oven is leaving money on the table.

"So many people think because their place isn't camera ready that they can't make extra money off of it. Why not?" he said.

Even when I asked if there was any danger that this could be construed as "poverty tourism," like those Wire tours of Baltimore, or tours of favelas or whatever, Bolger only paused briefly before answering.

"We're aiming at the space between the vacation rental home on mainstream vacation rental sites and Couchsurfingnet.com. There's a big gap there and we're creating a new market, I believe," Bolger said. "We're not here to judge what you construe as a hovel or not. Again the name was very tongue and cheek, it was supposed to be from the start."

I asked Bolger how low was too low for HovelStay and he assured me they had patches of dirt in Seattle that were available to campers. I asked if they could forbid cleaning or something to get more character or whatever and he laughed.

"Like 'spread some bedbugs around the place'? No no no, we at least want it to at least be clean," he said. That's actually better than some motels I stayed at growing up, places with cigarette burns on all the blankets and the TV remote bolted to the bedside table.

So HovelStay is pretty much AirBnB, but with cooler looking options and nothing that costs more than 100 bucks. Basically it seems to exist to take the piss out of people who humblebrag about "little places" they know of.

Is there some sense of adventure lost when you're just using a website to find that unique experience? Maybe. Is the quest for an "authentic" experience that isn't booked via the internet sort of classist and weird in its own right? Almost definitely. Do enough people who can't afford other places have internet access? That's sort of a separate question.

I don't know if "the adventure" of traveling was ever about how one booked a place to stay. If I may opine for a moment, the experience of finding and booking affordable places while traveling is just about as tedious and annoying as things get. If that's all you're losing, then here's my $40. I'll be in the Yoga Forest if you need me.