holiday apartment rental in New York

[smilesandsun]

Hi, We're looking at going to NY later in the year, has anyone rented an apartment rather than going the hotel route? Wondering what web sites you would recommend?

Thanks!

We stayed in an apartment in Greenwich village for 10 days in July - was perfect for us with 3 DCs (5, 3 and 7m), more space and freedom than a hotel! And the family had kids same ages, so there were books, toys, trikes galore. (Three flights of stairs, no lift, and we STILL loved it!)

We found it through this website
Have fun!

DON'T DO IT !!!

Having been to NYC a few times, I made good use of the New York forum on Tripadviser. The local experts regularly have to advise that 99.9% of 'holiday' apartment rentals in New York are either scams or illegal.

I mean, would you hand over £1000 or more to someone you have only communicated with online, ask for full payment before you travel, where you have no guarantee that the apartment even exists and if there is a problem, no way of getting your money back.

Please go and have a read of the Tripadviser forum.

Friends told us we were mad to have booked an apratment-hotel (like a suite, with a kitchen) which was $$$$$, and that we could have got more space for less bucks looking on Craigslist (which is like gumtree, I gather). But reading cjib's post above, maybe we were right...

we stayed here jamaica bay
with Hulababy - was great if a little way out, Was about 1h 15 min to the bottom left hand corner of central park but only 50min to the finance district. The A train was fab and we rarely had to stand as the lovely local lads always stood up.

I second the holiday rentals website that katz gave you. We used them and you can get some bargains if you look hard enough. We stayed in chelsea.

Don't use craigslist unless you're feeling very lucky. I narrowly missed being ripped off to the tune of $800 through them. Intuition made me call the owner of the apartment being advertised, only to find out that he had never placed a craigslist ad and I was about to send the (overly large) deposit to someone passing themselves off as him.

we've used the holiday rentals website lots of times all over the world - and so far never had a problem.