When I’m looking for travel lodging options and can’t find a home exchange, I often turn to peer to peer rental lodging. This is one of the most well known aspects of sharing economy lodging as most people have heard of AirBnb. But there are many other similar websites, some for specific markets or regions, and even some that aggregate results across multiple rental sites. I wrote a full review of the state of the peer to peer rental market here. And you can find my spreadsheet of all the sharing economy lodging companies (that I know of) here.
SleepOut.com
I’ve just learned of yet another peer to peer rental lodging website, SleepOut, which is interesting because it focuses on Africa: South Africa, Zanzibar, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Malawi, Cape Verde, even Rwanda. I recently wrote about my relative lack of travel in Africa so this is good news to me as I consider options for exploring that continent.
This company has been around since 2012 but they made some big waves in 2014 and I look forward to seeing expansion of peer to peer services like SleepOut in Africa. If anyone knows of other sharing economy travel services on that continent let me know, my list for the region is very sparse.