Over Thanksgiving, I received a mailing which contained a passing reference to a new internet service called The Right Vacation Rental (www.therightvacationrental.com). It was only when I accessed the website and learned it was operated by the 30-year-old Untours (www.untours.com), of Media, Pennsylvania, that I fully understood the importance of the new development. I posted my initial understanding of this new outfit in a post that appeared yesterday, and have now succeeded in reaching and speaking with the person in charge, who is Marilee Taussig, daughter of Untours founder Hal Taussig.

Untours, you should know, is a unique company that has successfully sent tens of thousands of Americans to enjoy two-week stays in European apartments, where they directly experience the daily life of European communities, shopping for groceries, meeting the postmaster, talking with townsfolk, scanning the newspaper. Untours' clients, who are called Untourists, receive round-trip airfare, the two-week apartment rental, a self-drive car for those two weeks (or a railpass), and the hand-holding services of an Untours representative living nearby. Some thirty to forty Europeans work for Untours in scattered locations and help to choose the apartments in which Untourists live.

But back to the new organization. The Right Vacation Rental, according to Marilee Taussig, is like a graduate school for the successful users of Untours' more comprehensive programs. It provides only the apartment rental -- and by the way, 80% of the accommodations offered are apartments in a two-family or multi-family buildings, not separate, individual vacation homes, as I initially reported -- and they are all in low-cost areas or cities of Europe to which the main Untours program does not presently operate: Croatia and Slovenia, Spain and such lesser-known regions of Italy as Le Marche and Emilia Romagna, Corfu, Corsica and Crete, Santorini, Normandy and the Dordogne in France, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Krakow in Poland. A user of the new service is more "on their own" than on Untours, according to Marilee Taussig, and is expected to obtain their own transportation both to and within Europe. They are hardened veterans, not neophytes.

Why is this an advance? Firstly, every apartment property offered has been physically seen and inspected either by an American staff member of Untours or by one of their European representatives. By contrast, the typical international real estate broker offers many hundreds of apartments and vacation homes for rent, which in most cases (and I say this based on experience) they have never seen. Some of them simply reprint, in their catalogues, photographs (occasionally misleading) supplied to them by the owner of the property.

Second, the mark-up of the rental price is a slight one meant only to cover handling costs. Again, some of the international real estate brokers either double or triple the price at which the same apartments or vacation homes are listed by local real estate brokers dealing with European vacationers. (I have personally uncovered instances in which a vacation home in Tuscany is tripled in rental price for international sales).

I think this is all a marvelous development. You can obtain an apartment for an average of $400 to $900 per apartment per week (though there are higher-priced ones) in exciting European locations, thus thumbing your nose at the high costs of a European vacation resulting from the recent decline of the U.S. dollar. And you can enjoy the unique experience of living in Europe like a native.

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Labels: accommodations, eastern europe, western europe