In our comfortable cubicles—did I mention we’re flying Business Class? Because we’re flying Business Class—the turbulence feels like 11 hours of washboard road.
Our plane judders through unstable air the entire red-eye flight from LAX to CDG, the fasten-seatbelt signs strobing and chiming. The Boeing 777 is a huge airplane; doing my mid-flight laps, I brush aside curtains hanging like cobwebs dividing a seemingly endless succession of darkened cabins, each revealing yet more sleeping bodies contorted freakishly in seats not made for sitting, much less sleeping. In our comfortable cubicles—did I mention we’re flying Business Class? Because we’re flying Business Class—the turbulence feels like 11 hours of washboard road.
Unlike the butt-numbing seats in Low Class, our seats are cushioned with leavened foam. Also they extend completely flat. In the adjoining cubicle Karen the Navigator—made drowsy by the Bonine she takes for motion-sickness—is getting quality sleep. I don't sleep on long flights. I read, watch movies, and web surf, purposely staying awake through the entire flight and the next day. By the evening of arrival day I am so beat that I fall dead asleep the moment I lie down. In the morning, I wake with my body clock reset to local time. I'm sure it’s unhealthy for a geriatric to pull an all-nighter, but for me it defangs jet lag.
We deplane at CDG and reach the CDG-NCE departure gate after a long march. There we join the waiting polloi. Our displeasure at having to rub our Business Class shoulders with the masses is mollified—somewhat—by having separate boarding access. We board a 737 for the two-hour CDG-NCE hop. The flight is uneventful—one does not want one’s flights to be eventful—and the pilot sticks the landing. The weather is clear as we taxi through the twilight; the heavy rain predicted—a 100% chance—has evaporated. After the immensity of CDG, the small Nice airport feels cozy, and a short walk brings us to baggage carrousels, one of which spits our bags out like giant red loogeys. I grab a baggage cart—free (Hello, LAWA)—and we head for the exit.
There's an insanely convenient tram—Line 2—that stops 30 meters from the entrances to NCE's Terminals 1 and 2 (Hello, LAWA) and that tram travels the 6km (3.7 miles) to, and then bisects, Nice. In fact it stops half-a-block from our Airbnb apartment. But we have a lot of luggage, so rather than drag all our bags first aboard the tram and then along the sidewalks to our building, we've splurged on a car service. Exiting Terminal 1 into the warm, humid air, I see my name in big letters on an iPad held aloft by Josh, our driver.
Nice’s traffic is as gnarly as LA’s. (For proof, see the video of an ambulance trying to get through the morning clog on the Promenade des Anglais; should you find yourself in Nice, it's best to have your emergency outside commute hours.) At 21:30 on a Saturday evening, though, the driving is easy. We make a brief stop at a small hotel where our Airbnb “host” has left our entry fob. A minute later we pull up in front of our building. Josh unloads our bags, courteously waits until I’ve opened the green, wrought iron gate, calls out Bon soir, and drives off.
I drag our bags inside the gate, then heist them one at a time up the four steps into the covered entrance. Then it takes me a minute to find where to hold the fob to open the sliding doors into the lobby. Once I’ve opened the sesame, I pull the bags into the air conditioning. Then I commence to following our host's instructions for getting the elevator up to—and then getting ourselves into—our Airbnb apartment in Nice.
Which is when things slide sideways.
One of the inherent weakness of the Airbnb model is the handoff of keys; if you’re a property owner, you can't just leave your place open, so some method of transferring keys has to be arranged. Hotels have desk clerks who mediate the layers between your head and their pillow, but that’s not an option in a semi-private Airbnb transaction. Airbnb has struggled mightily to wrestle "self-check-in" to the ground, but there’s a lot of wishful thinking involved there; it's way better if the proprietor or an agent meets the proprietee, personally hands over the keys, or fobs, or codes, then provides a brief orientation.
Because every private dwelling has quirks: light switches that don't work as expected (or that simply don't work), appliances that work only if you're rubbing your stomach while patting your head, rooms in a hidden sub-basement where you bring your trash. Add appliance manuals written in foreign languages, controls that don't work the same as they do at home, symbols that make sense only if you already know what they mean, and storage of things like paper towels and toilet paper arranged according to an owner’s idiosyncratic logic and you can easily end up with stacks of dirty dishes and piles of unwashed clothes.
But these are inconveniences you can sort out once you’ve gotten into your temporary place. Not being able to get into your apartment in the first place, that’s more than inconvenient. Having been provided with incorrect instructions directing you to the wrong apartment where the supplied six-digit entry code doesn't match the door’s four-digit keypad, plus a “host” living 933kms away in Paris whose phone number you don’t have, plus a local agent who doesn't answer her phone or respond to texts, and you’re flirting with disaster.
If/when an Airbnb self-check-in doesn't go right—and every step has to go exactly right or it won’t go right—you could end up praying you don’t get shot by a frightened apartment dweller freaked out by the sounds of a stranger working his door locks at night, or, as we did, sitting in the lobby of a strange building in a strange city whose inhabitants speak a (to you) strange language and, without a clue what to do next, hoping you don’t get arrested for vagrancy.
