Traveling with Mold Illness/Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

I recently drove across the entire northern US with my fiancé and our dog to move from Vermont to Washington state. We did it in 8 days, and we stayed in 8 airbnbs and hotels. Given that I’m still recovering from mold illness, I was pretty hesitant to stay in so many different buildings without knowing for sure whether they’ll trigger debilitating symptoms I’ve struggled with like severe eczema, nasal allergies, digestive issues, etc. However, I feel a lot better than I did 6 months ago, and we really wanted to live in Washington state, so I went for it.

So we tried to book airbnbs or hotels that we felt had the lowest chance of being unhealthy. How?

1.) When choosing airbnbs, we only booked “guest favorites,” which have high ratings.

2.) When choosing either hotels or airbnbs, we searched reviews and eliminated options with the following keywords: “mold,” “mildew,” “stink,” “smell,” and “odor." We felt better about options with the keyword “clean.”

3.) We requested that the host not use fragrances on the day before our stay. We didn’t start off requesting this at first, but we realized we needed to. Here’s the blurb we used. You can steal it.

“Hi, we’re looking forward to our stay! Just wanted to make a quick request: would you be okay with not using any fragrances (such as glade plugins, scent diffusers, or spraying febreze or lysol) during the cleaning before our stay, if they’re normally used? We’re chemically sensitive. Thank you so much for considering.”

Fragrance is a huge problem in the airbnb world. If someone uses it, you should ask yourself the question “I wonder what they’re trying to hide.” If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: a truly clean house has no odor at all.

4.) This isn’t always easy to see from pictures, but we looked at external and internal indicators of water damage. I’ll summarize some key areas to look at when going through listings online: First, we focus on making sure we avoid basement units. These are typically much damper and moldier than units above the ground. Many homes have poor drainage around the foundation. That water tends to soak into the parts of the home that are below grade the most.

Next, we look at the shower - sometimes you can tell by the pictures that it’s moldy, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the shower isn’t even shown in the pictures - we’ve found that that’s a red flag and can often indicate that the host is trying to hide mold issues.

Anyway, if you really want to delve deep into the art of inspecting for signs of water damage, I discuss them in this article.

Sometimes we had to book airbnbs that we knew weren’t optimal because of limited availability in a given location, date, or under our budget. For instance, we tried to find places without carpeting, but that was almost never possible. Choosing only places that don’t use fragrance wasn’t possible for us either. Many places said they don’t use fragrance, but their bedding turned out to be heavily scented with detergent or dryer sheets, or there were smelly soaps, or even scent diffusers left out. But requesting no fragrances beforehand did seem to help minimize the use of fragrance sprays.

I hope this article helps you travel in a healthier manner. Thanks for attentively reading.