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Another way to great stays

A visually striking Airbnb stay in Islas Mujeres, Mexico

A 1950s modernist apartment in a heritage-listed block in the heart of the City of London for about $85 per person per night. A cosy bolthole in one of central Oslo's most multicultural neighbourhoods for less than $80 per person per night. A big, light-filled bedroom in a restored former tenement building in Brooklyn's Williamsburg for $50 a night.

These are just a few of the places I've stayed while travelling in recent years, all of them booked online through the accommodation rental site Airbnb.

Founded in 2008, Airbnb is not new and has been gaining in popularity for some time, practically to the point of ubiquity among certain types of travellers. For me, it's become the first point of call for booking accommodation pretty much anywhere.

It's fair to say it's also having a bit of a moment, igniting discussion around the world about the positives, negatives and legalities of the so-called "sharing economy" which it typifies.

To the uninitiated, you might explain Airbnb as a website which allows people to rent out their home or spare room but that doesn't quite capture the essence of it.

The accommodation listed tends to be design-conscious, often a bit quirky and sometimes nothing short of spectacular. Travellers can choose to rent a whole home or apartment, a private room, or to share a room, for stays ranging from a couple of nights to a month or more.

If you've ever wanted to spend your holiday in a geodesic dome in southern Spain, a retro caravan with its own recording studio in upstate New York, John Steinbeck's writing studio in California, or even your own Fijian island, you can find it on Airbnb. Indeed, of its more than 800,000 listings in 190 countries worldwide, the company says that more than 600 are castles - and then there are the assorted luxury yachts, tree houses, horse ranches, underground houses, old- fashioned wagons, converted buses, former lighthouses and windmills listed alongside the more conventional places. Yurts, in particular, seem to be a speciality, for some reason.

Although the emphasis is at least partly on unusual and interesting places to stay, this is only part of the appeal of Airbnb. There's also the potential to save money: not all the site's rentals are cheap but they can be very good value and, if you book a place with a kitchen, you can save further by self-catering. And having your own place - often outside of the usual tourist enclaves - can give you the feeling of living like a local, as part of a neighbourhood where locals are going about their everyday lives.

And then there's the personal element. Many Airbnb hosts are very hospitable, providing a warm welcome, local recommendations and personal touches that can make the experience more akin to staying with a friend than in a stranger's place. When my boyfriend and I stayed in that modernist apartment in London, for example, our host Eliot left us a key to access the Boris Bikes, an Oyster card for public transport and a local pay-as-you-go SIM card. We never met him during our stay (he had a friend let us in on arrival) but we had the warm, fuzzy feeling that someone was looking out for us nonetheless.

There is, of course, an element of risk in booking accommodation this way - as when booking a hotel, hostel or other accommodation online, there's always a small part of your mind wondering whether it will live up your expectations and look like the photographs on the site.

So apply similar logic as you would with any online transaction: read the reviews left by past guests, familiarise yourself with the host's profile and ask them questions prior to booking. Look out for listings with the words "Verified Photo" underneath the images - these have been taken by one of Airbnb's network of professional photographers.

And read the listing carefully so you know what's included and what fees you'll have to pay (some hosts charge a flat cleaning fee, and Airbnb also charges a fee for the booking and will take a security deposit at the time of booking, refundable after check-out).

There have been some high- profile incidents of things going badly wrong with Airbnb stays - the guest who hosted an (unauthorised) orgy in his New York rental in March; another who simply refused to leave at the end of his stay, citing squatter's rights - but with one million guests staying in rentals booked on the site every month, mostly without incident, it's a business model which seems to run pretty smoothly on trust.

Airbnb has been involved in other controversies, though, mostly relating to the legalities of renting accommodation without a tourism licence, or of tenants sub-letting their apartments in contradiction of local housing laws.

In the US, New York in particular has had crackdowns on short-term rentals of this kind, and media reports suggest that some Sydney hosts have been threatened with hefty fines for renting accommodation on Airbnb without a council permit. These are issues which mainly affect hosts, rather than guests, but they have raised wider questions about the sharing economy, whereby people rent something they are not using (in this case, their home or spare room) to others.

Airbnb is perhaps the most high-profile example of this but others include Uber, the ridesharing app which launched in July in Perth. Some argue this kind of "collaborative consumption" represents the way of the future. Others express concerns about the tax and regulatory implications of these services, and their effect on existing conventional businesses. The British Government recently set up a review into the concept to gauge its potential effects.

Recently, I've been browsing Airbnb for somewhere to stay during a Melbourne holiday. And I can choose from a glamorous city apartment with a rooftop terrace, a gorgeous old cottage in Northcote, a 60s Airstream caravan in a Footscray backyard, a self- contained pool house in leafy Kooyong, a converted chocolate factory in Richmond and - but of course - an authentic Mongolian yurt in inner-city Fitzroy.