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Kalee Thompson is an editor covering health, fitness, baby, and kid gear. She has personally tested a dozen tents and an equal number of hair dryers. Cheap Led Transparent Screen
Whether you’re a brand-new Airbnb host or looking to improve your VRBO or HomeAway reviews, stocking your rental with the right supplies is essential to providing guests with a comfortable, hassle-free getaway.
Since 2018, we’ve mined the knowledge of frequent travelers and interviewed Airbnb Superhosts. We’ve also reflected on our own hard-earned lessons as short-term rental owners to determine the top items to invest in for your Airbnb or other rental property.
Of course, just like regular homes, rentals run the gamut in terms of size, style, and number of amenities. And how you equip your property may also be influenced by whether you live on-site or are managing from hundreds of miles away. But the common theme we heard from a wide range of hosts and travelers was that most guests expect any rental to be as well-equipped as the typical hotel room.
Outfitting your space with high-quality sheets and towels, a comfortable mattress, a nice coffee setup, and touches that surpass expectations can make the difference between a meh review and a happy guest—and can keep your calendar filled with new visitors.
Everyone loves getting a great night’s sleep. That means having a good mattress, soft sheets, comfortable pillows, and quality bedding, even in a budget rental. Ideally you’ll want to use mattress and pillow protectors to guard against spills and stains. Many guests also appreciate a bedside lamp that’s bright enough for reading, so they won’t have to get out of bed to turn off the lights. And to make your guests feel cozy year-round, consider providing an extra layer or two—like a warm blanket or throw. For cold climates, you could even add some heated mattress pads.
If you prefer silky, smooth, drapey sheets that resist wrinkling, these feel softer and more luxurious than many pricier sheets we’ve tried.
I’ve slept on a number of Wirecutter’s sheet picks over the years, and the sheets I rely on for my two Airbnb rentals are in JCPenney’s Wrinkle Guard 400 TC Sheet Set. These sheets come in seven colors and range in size from full to California king. They are reliably available, regularly on sale for between $50 and $60 (for a queen set), and feel luxurious for the price. Sateen sheets like these tend to be less wrinkly, and I appreciate that this set (like many of our picks) comes with two pillow cases (you can buy additional matching cases separately). We use four pillows on a queen-size bed, and I’ve found that pillowcases get stained more often than any other linens in our rentals. (Wirecutter has solid advice on washing sheets.)
If you’re looking to spend less, consider the sateen Threshold Performance 400 Thread Count Sheet Set from Target. After spending 200 hours researching sheet sets, we concluded that these Target sheets are as soft and comfortable to sleep on as sets that cost four times the price. The Target sheets come in nearly 20 colors and six sizes, including twin. If you want a more traditional crisp, cool-feeling sheet, we also love L.L.Bean’s 280-Thread-Count Pima Cotton Percale Sheets. For more options, including flannel and linen choices, see our guide to the best sheets.
This Costco comforter is one of the best budget comforters we’ve tried. It’s warm, lofty, and filled with 100% goose down, which is usually much more expensive than duck down. We think this is a fantastic value, with an excellent warranty.
The Utopia comforter is a warm yet relatively breathable down-alternative option. It would be ideal for a room where you don’t want to splurge on bedding, for people with down allergies, or for those who avoid animal products.
Pairing a relatively affordable down comforter with a higher-end duvet cover is the route I’ve taken with my own rentals. In one apartment, I’m using a decade-old L.L.Bean down comforter (a former Wirecutter pick) that’s still perfectly great. In the other one, I use a down comforter from Costco that’s similar to the Hotel Grand White Goose Down Comforter we recommend in our guide to the best comforters. The Costco comforter is warm and lofty, with a pleasantly soft shell. And I think the typical guest isn’t likely to guess it costs half as much as a similar down comforter from Brooklinen (whose light-and-fluffy All-Season Down Comforter was one of our overall favorites in testing).
If you prefer to avoid down or are looking for a lower-priced option, we think you’ll do well with the Utopia Bedding Queen Comforter Duvet Insert (or you can keep an extra one in the closet for guests with allergies). We found the Utopia comforter was better at regulating heat than the higher-priced down-alternative comforters we tried, and its outer shell was softer than that of many competitors.
This soft and comfortable percale cover comes in the most stylish and interesting prints we’ve seen. It’s one of the least expensive covers we tried, but it feels like nice hotel bedding.
By investing in a duvet cover, you can protect your rental’s comforter, and you won’t have to launder it often. For our guide to duvet covers we love, we spent 96 hours researching covers and tested 16. And we concluded that the Brooklinen Classic Duvet Cover is as soft and comfortable as more expensive covers, and it held up better in the wash than much of the competition. The cover’s crisp feel and look reminded our testers of bedding you might find at a nice hotel. And after using these covers in my own Airbnb rentals for almost a year and a half, they still look brand new. (I chose the darker graphite and dusk blue colors in the hope that they would better obscure small blemishes, which they have.) If your decor or climate better lends itself to a cozy flannel duvet cover, we recommend the L.L.Bean Ultrasoft Comfort Flannel Comforter Cover. It comes in eight solid colors, plus check and stripe prints.
This Costco favorite is a great value because it’s made from foam that’s as dense (and probably as durable) as the foam in mattresses that are twice the price. Testers loved the Novaform ComfortGrande’s cuddly yet supportive feel, but some found it to be too firm.
If you need a good guest bed, we recommend the 14-inch Novaform ComfortGrande foam mattress from Costco—the upgrade pick in our cheap mattress guide. It’s comfortably supportive, providing a loose-cuddly sensation without a pronounced memory-foam sink. Delivery is also quick and easy, and the mattress comes with a 20-year warranty and a stand-out return policy (in case you conclude it’s not for you or your guests). In our brand-concealed comparison testing, we’ve consistently found the Novaform ComfortGrande to be a crowd-pleaser. Most people who lie down on it like it well enough, and many find it more comfortable than mattresses that cost twice as much.
When my husband and I were starting out as Airbnb hosts, we furnished our two apartments from scratch. For our slightly fancier rental, we splurged on the on-sale Saatva Classic Mattress in Luxury Firm, a pick in Wirecutter’s guide to inner-spring mattresses. For our second rental, we bought a queen-size Novaform ComfortGrande for less than half the Saatva’s sale price. I do think most people would agree that the Saatva mattress—or nearly any of the more-expensive mattresses we recommend at Wirecutter—is more comfortable than the Novaform ComfortGrande. That is, they likely would, if they were to lie on mattress after mattress, while thinking hard about how their body was feeling supported—which has, in fact, been part of my job at Wirecutter over the years. But as an Airbnb host, I’ve found that we get as many compliments on the Novaform mattress as we do on the Saatva, and the guests who’ve inquired have consistently been surprised to learn that the Novaform ComfortGrande is a budget mattress from Costco.
Of course, depending on your taste and clientele, you may prefer a more-luxurious mattress. In our extensive mattress coverage, we offer a range of recommendations. This overview of all the mattresses we recommend is a starting point. Or you can go directly to our guides to memory-foam mattresses, inner-spring mattresses, hybrid mattresses, and cheap mattresses (under $500 for a queen), among others. If, however, you already have an older firm mattress that you’d like to refresh, consider getting a mattress topper; it can lend softness and support to a too-firm mattress (it won’t fix a sagging or lumpy one, though).
A longtime favorite among our testers, this pillow has moldable, customizable filling that offers firm support for back- and side-sleepers. What it doesn’t have: the lingering chemical smell we’ve noticed in some other shredded-foam pillows.
This customizable down-alternative pillow is softer than shredded foam, so it’s better for stomach-sleepers who need less loft than the Nest Easy Breather provides. It’s also much less messy to adjust.
You can’t predict what kind of pillow any one guest will prefer, but you can make up your bed with a versatile combination of pillows likely to please most people. After talking with a half-dozen sleep and bedding-industry experts and spending 1,000 nights sleeping on a total of 120 pillows for our guide to the best pillows, the adjustable Nest Bedding Easy Breather shredded-foam pillow is our overall favorite. We also love the Sleep Number PlushComfort Pillow Ultimate, a customizable down-alternative pillow that’s ideal for stomach-sleepers who have a hard time finding the right height. Getting a couple of both is smart. There’s a reason hotels tend to make their beds with four pillows: Many people want to sleep with more than one pillow.
An ideal approach may be to adjust each customizable pillow differently, so you optimize the chances each guest will find one that feels just right. But for a rental, adjustable pillows may also seem like too much trouble or an added expense. We also like the Sleep Number PlushComfort Classic, a nonadjustable (and less expensive) version of our top-pick PlushComfort Ultimate. If you don’t want to spend a lot on pillows for a rental, our budget pick, the adjustable Xtreme Comforts Shredded Memory Foam Pillow, is another option.
This inexpensive fitted mattress protector is one of the few that stayed fully waterproof through our tests, and it’s comfortable to sleep on.
Top-notch seaming and quality construction make these encasements better than most. They’re priced well, and using them will extend the life of pillows by years.
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If you’re investing in new mattresses and pillows, you’ll want to protect them (and doing so may also reassure guests that you’re diligent about cleanliness). After spending 240 hours researching and testing 14 mattress protectors, we found the SafeRest Premium Mattress Protector did the best job of keeping our mattresses dry while still being comfortable to sleep on.
If your primary concern is blocking bugs, mattress encasements (protectors that fully envelop your mattress) are the way to go, but they can be a hassle to put on and take off for laundering. If you’re mostly concerned about spills, mattress protectors are the simpler and less expensive option—they’re more like a base-layer fitted sheet. I’ve personally relied on the SafeRest Premium Mattress Protector for my family’s beds. I recently stripped sheets off a bed in my Airbnb to find a menstrual leak on the SafeRest protector—and I was relieved to find that the close-to-new mattress beneath was still pristine. For pillows, the Protect-A-Bed AllerZip Smooth Pillow Protectors are the best encasements for shielding your pillows from bedbugs and dust mites, and they’ll block liquid spills, as well.
With its electronically generated sounds, the LectroFan EVO masks a wider variety of noises than the other machines we tested in its price range.
There are so many factors that can interfere with guests getting a good night’s sleep, but unpredictable environmental noises are one you can try to mitigate. Whether you hope to help guests block out street noise, loud neighbors, barking dogs, or other jarring sounds (in my own neighborhood, shrieking seagulls often serve as an unwanted alarm clock), a white-noise machine can help. The LectroFan EVO is the top pick in our guide to the best white-noise machines. It’s inexpensive and easy to use, but it plays exclusively electronically generated white noise.
The dial on our upgrade pick, the Sound+Sleep SE, makes it super simple for the uninitiated to choose from potentially soothing sounds recorded from nature—like ocean waves, rainfall, or meadow sounds—as well as the standard white-noise variations. We have white-noise machines on bedside tables in each of our Airbnb rentals, and we let guests know they’re there. And because of those extremely loud seagulls (who occasionally nest on our roof) and our own exuberant kids (who live right upstairs and tend to wake hours earlier than the average tourist to our seaside city), we also provide disposable earplugs.
Good-quality towels, a hair dryer, and a clean shower-curtain liner are the minimum that most guests expect in a rental bathroom. For many, basic toiletries (like you’d find in a nice hotel room) may also feel like a requirement. I personally supply body wash as well as shampoo and conditioner, and I have learned to stick to the same brands so I can top off bottles at changeovers. I also provide Brooklinen waffle-weave bathrobes in our higher-end rental, and they lend a fancy-hotel feel. I’ve found that these inexpensive black face cloths save us having to replace as many white face cloths. And I also make sure to always provide a few extra rolls of toilet paper (yes, Wirecutter has a guide to that) and two boxes of tissues, so there’s no risk of running out. Finally, when a plunger is called for, both you and your guests will be deeply grateful that there’s one on hand and no phone call is needed.
This towel is soft and plush like a luxury-hotel towel, and it comes in several sumptuous colors.
Onsen’s textured towels are lighter, drape better, and dry faster than any terry towels we tried. They look luxurious but unfussy, and they cost less than similar lattice-weave towels.
New, soft matching towels help even the most basic bathroom feel inviting. The Frontgate Resort Cotton Towel consistently ranks as the softest, warmest, and most comfortable towel we’ve tested for our guide to the best towel. And we’ve found that the Frontgate towels hold up remarkably well to years of daily use. For hosts who see rapid turnover, it may make sense to have more than one set. “If you have clients back to back, you don’t have time to get to the fluff and fold,” said Airbnb Superhost Nicole Policicchio. (Policicchio rents her second home, a Mammoth, California, condo known on Airbnb and VRBO as John Muir’s Ace Hotel.) The Frontgate towels are sold individually, rather than as sets, and are also available in a bigger, bath-sheet size. The company’s towel-like Resort Bath Mat complements the towels and is a pick in our guide to the best bathroom rugs and bath mats. It won’t cling to the floor like some other mats, but it is notably soft underfoot and easy to wash.
If you prefer a more minimalist towel that still feels like something special, we also love the waffle-weave Onsen towels. I’ve been using the Onsen towels in one of my two rentals, and I like that they are lighter and thinner and thus quicker to wash, since I can throw them in with the sheets (a couple sets of the Frontgate towels easily require their own load of laundry). The Onsen towels also dry more quickly between uses. Overall, though, the Frontgate towels probably have a more universal appeal and better mimic what you’d find in a higher-end hotel.
This hair dryer is lightweight and has a long cord. And among the models we tested, it tied for blowing the hottest and fastest air. We like it just as much as dryers that are several times the price.
This Conair dryer is just as fast at drying hair as pricier models. But it’s one of the heaviest we tested, and its attachments can be hard to remove.
If you’re used to relying on a good-quality hair dryer at home, the loud, weakly powered models found in most hotels can be irritating at best. Many guests will expect to see a hair dryer at a short-term rental, and—attention hotel owners!—a good one doesn’t have to break the bank. (Plus, Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk once claimed that the addition of a hair dryer alone can generate $10 more per booking per night). We’ve spent years long-term testing the hair dryers we recommend in our guide to hair dryers, and our overall favorite, the Rusk W8less, is lightweight and easy to use, as well as powerful and reliable. Our budget pick, the InfinitiPro by Conair 1875-Watt Salon Performance AC Motor Styling Tool, is a fraction of the cost. It’s heavier than the Rusk, but it’s also a great dryer that’s far better than the ones usually found in hotel rooms. I keep a Rusk dryer in our higher-end rental and the InfinitiPro in our more-basic rental apartment.
This washable polyester shower liner works as well as liners that are twice the price. It won’t attract soap scum like a dime-store plastic liner, and it can also double as a shower curtain.
When staying at a friend’s house, most guests probably don’t judge too harshly if they notice a little mildew or film on the bottom of a shower curtain. But paying guests have higher standards of cleanliness, and a shower curtain is often one of the germiest spots in the house. Soap scum is “a lush bed of microbes” that could be a safety concern for the immune-impaired, according to a National Institutes of Health–funded study on shower-curtain schmutz.
The inexpensive Maytex Water Repellent Fabric Shower Curtain Liner works as well as reusable polyester liners that cost twice as much. It doesn’t have a plasticky smell, and it won’t attract that inevitable soap film the way plastic liners do. We recommend pairing it with an outer cloth shower curtain (we have a guide to shower curtains if you need inspiration). The Maytex liner hooks to your shower-curtain rings through simple button-hole slits (a design that eliminates concerns about rusting that can develop on metal grommets). You should wash polyester curtains with cold water, ideally on a gentle cycle. Using bleach is not recommended, since it can degrade the material. Hang to dry or use low heat.
For many people, the appeal of an Airbnb-type rental is that it offers more flexibility than a hotel. This includes being able to cook for yourself—or at least to enjoy your own glass of wine or eat breakfast without having to go to a restaurant. If your rental doesn’t have a fully equipped kitchen, some small kitchen appliances and basic glassware will help make guests feel at home. (Bonus points if your guests also find a great pair of scissors, a better-than-average pen, and a can opener that actually works in a kitchen drawer.)
This easy-to-use machine reliably brews hot coffee at the right strength.
This simple but elegant French press makes coffee that’s just as grit-free as brews made in much-pricier competitors.
The smallest Nespresso machine available makes as-good-as-Starbucks espresso drinks at the push of a button.
According to the rental hosts we spoke with, when it comes to making guests happy, a high-quality coffee setup is almost as important as good bedding and towels. My own experience as an Airbnb host corroborates that: I’ve seen more soon-to-be guests ask questions about the available coffee equipment than about any other amenities. We provide a programmable drip coffee maker and a French press, along with a bag of freshly ground coffee from a local coffee shop, sugar, cream, and oat creamer.
I moved our well-used personal coffee maker into our rental when we upgraded our own setup. If you’re shopping new for guest use, the Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Coffee Brewer is a traditional drip coffee maker, and it’s Wirecutter’s favorite budget coffee machine. Of the lower-cost coffee makers we tested, this one brewed the most balanced, best-tasting cup of everyday coffee, even from cheap, pre-ground beans, and it’s very easy to program. If you want a higher-end coffee maker, we have several suggestions.
If you think your guests might appreciate the option of a French press, we recommend the Bodum Chambord or the even-less-expensive Bodum Caffettiera in our guide to the best French press. (With this you’ll also need a kettle, which we have a recommendation for below). If you want to offer a single-serving system, we like the Nespresso Essenza Mini. The machine uses coffee pods, so it has some of the convenience of a Keurig, but it produces coffee that tastes much better. The pods are expensive (about 70¢ a shot, which works out to about $50 a pound), so you may need to factor that into the cost of your rental. You can recycle the pods through Nespresso’s prepaid pod-recycling program. And if you think your guests might prefer pour-over coffee, we have a guide to the best gear for that.
This 1.7-liter variable-temperature stainless steel kettle quickly brings water to the temps needed to get optimum flavor from teas and coffee.
This no-frills kettle lacks the bells and whistles of the variable-temperature models we recommend, but it does a fine job on the cheap.
Whether your guests want to boil water for coffee, tea, or even instant soup, an electric kettle will let them to do so fast, and it’s a great option if your rental doesn’t have a stovetop. The Cuisinart PerfecTemp CPK-17 is the top pick in our guide to the best electric kettles. This 1.7-liter model is ideal for brewing myriad teas, making French press coffee, or simply boiling water for instant oatmeal. Due to the winning combination of speed, temperature accuracy, and ease of use, this model beat out the other electric kettles we tested. We especially like the streamlined design, with preset temperature settings as buttons on the handle. You just add the water, hit the temperature you want, and listen for the beep when it’s done. The kettle then kicks into an automated keep-warm cycle, where it maintains the set temperature for up to 30 minutes. If you don’t think your guests are likely to use or appreciate a variable temperature kettle, our budget pick, the Hamilton Beach 40880 Stainless Steel 1.7 Liter Kettle, is a reliable, less expensive choice.
This cube-shaped fridge can hold a few dozen canned drinks, and it’s a fine spot to store leftovers for a day or two.
A larger—but still mini—option, our upgrade pick has the best shelving of any model at its price and size. With a crisper drawer and a full-width freezer, it's great for drinks, snacks, and perishable items.
If you’re renting a room or small apartment where guests won’t have access to a kitchen, a mini fridge provides valued convenience. For an inexpensive, compact fridge, we recommend the Midea WHS-65L. All cube fridges work more or less the same, but this one is a bit cheaper. It has enough space to hold some leftovers or a few dozen canned drinks. If you want something a little bigger, we like the Danby Diplomat DCR044B1BM. It has the best interior layout, with ample space for all kinds of foods and beverages. It also has a full-width freezer compartment, individual can holsters, and movable glass shelves.
This midsize microwave looks better and has a few more useful features (including a mute option, automatic reheating, and a door handle instead of a button) than similar ovens.
If you’re tight on space or want to spend less, this slightly smaller version of our favorite Toshiba microwave works well and has most of the same great features.
When your guests want to warm up last night’s leftovers, they’ll appreciate a simple-to-use microwave. As we explain in our guide to microwaves, most models are fundamentally the same machine. But our overall favorite is the midsize Toshiba EM131A5C, which has simple controls and is relatively compact. It can hold up to a 9-inch-square casserole dish, and in our testing we found it provided consistent results when heating up a variety of foods and beverages. It includes all of the typical preset programs, as well as the crucial add-30-seconds button, which helps deliver more-precise heating results. The Toshiba ML2-EM25PAE is a bit smaller and a little less expensive, and it may be a better choice for a tinier space.
This inexpensive Cuisinart toaster browned bread more evenly than almost anything else we tested, and it looks attractive on any countertop.
The compact FlashXpress Toaster Oven evenly toasts bread, bakes cookies, and brings frozen foods to life as well as or better than competitors that cost significantly more.
After dozens of hours researching and testing for our guide to toasters, we found that the simple, inexpensive Cuisinart CPT-122 2-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster browned bread, bagels, and waffles better than the competition. The plastic controls offer a wide range of toasting settings and feel sturdier than the plastic dials and knobs on some other toasters we tested. The two-slot Cuisinart is also one of the smallest, most attractive toasters we tested—ideal for a more-compact rental space. (If you want a bigger toaster, we also like the 4-slice version.) Both sizes come in white or black, which I chose to match the other appliances in our rental’s kitchen.
If you’re looking for something more versatile than a traditional toaster, the Panasonic FlashXpress is the smaller of the two top picks in our guide to toaster ovens. We love it for its strong baking performance, compact size, reasonable price, and ability to quickly heat leftovers and frozen snacks. It cooked toast and other foods to an even, golden-brown hue better than most other toaster ovens we tried, and its toast-shade settings were among the most accurate.
These well-balanced wine glasses are good-looking and showcase most wines very nicely.
Whether your guests are enjoying a fine vintage or a supermarket special, they’ll surely appreciate having good glasses for a toast. And the Libbey Signature Kentfield Estate All-Purpose Wine Glasses will showcase most wines nicely. These inexpensive, well-balanced glasses have thinly pulled walls and thin rims, a rarity for glasses in this price range. The Libbey glasses are durable and dishwasher-safe (essential for rentals), and since they’re relatively affordable and easy to replace, you won’t be heartbroken if one breaks. If you prefer stemless glasses, we recommend the Rastal Harmony Stemless in our guide to wine glasses. If you think your guests would be happy enough using regular drinking glasses for wine or other beverages, we have recommendations for durable options in our guide to drinking glasses (all of our picks can usually withstand a drop on the floor). No matter which glassware you provide, you don’t need to spend a lot to provide guests with a great bottle opener.
To help guests feel comfortable and secure (and to minimize receiving a string of questions or, worse, complaints), provide them with easy ways to unlock the rental, control the temperature, and stay connected to the internet (and streaming services).
The Kidde is an affordable high-quality lockbox, and for our locksmith testers, its unique combination-dial design was consistently the toughest to break open.
How to best ensure easy but secure access for guests—this is a dilemma that every host must address. Perhaps you’d prefer to forgo actual keys, or maybe your guests would appreciate accessing the space from their phone. Or you might just want the lights, music, and AC to kick on when guests arrive. Whatever the reason, choose a smart lock like the small, secure, keypad-equipped Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt, which is the top pick in our guide to the best smart locks. I rely on smart locks for our rentals, and the convenience is significant: Each guest gets a unique code that expires when their stay is over. In this Ask Wirecutter piece, we offer more perspective on using smart locks for rental properties specifically.
If you simply want to stow a spare key so guests can let themselves in when you’re not around, testing for our guide to the best lockbox determined that the Kidde AccessPoint KeySafe is hands-down the best wall-mounted lockbox available. It’s the only affordable lockbox with a combination dial, which our professional locksmith testers found much more difficult to pick than the wheel-style or push-button locks you see from the competition. Or if you’re more of a low-cost, low-tech, low-worry kind of host, a fake rock could be your friend; our favorite is the Hide-a-Key Fake Rock.
The compact Vornado 630 can send breezes to the far corners of a large room. It’s also easy to control and clean, and it has a long-established record of reliability.
The cooling breeze of a simple fan can help your guests control their own comfort. Over several years, we’ve spent dozens of hours researching, testing, and living with fans in an overheated house and measuring air-blowing output with equipment from the HVAC industry. And we think the Vornado 630 Medium Air Circulator is the best room fan for most people. The Vornado 630 simply moves more air than any other fan we’ve tested, thanks to a design that continuously circulates the air (as opposed to blowing it intermittently across your face, like an oscillating fan does). The 630 doesn’t take up too much floor space, and it is relatively quiet; the sound it does make resembles a smooth white noise, as opposed to the choppy whirr that most other powerful fans produce. We also like the smaller, cheaper Vornado 460 Small Air Circulator, another pick in our guide to fans.
The Vornado VH200 heated a room faster and more evenly than other models we tested, offering the best combination of power, comfort, and quietness.
One person’s comfy is another person’s chilly. Guests traveling from different climates may have different preferences; a small space heater will let them control the temperature to their comfort level. We tested 67 space heaters to find the best for small and large rooms. To heat a space quickly and quietly, we recommend the Vornado VH200. It’s affordable, efficient, and compact enough to easily transport between rooms. (We also highly encourage you to include directions on how to safely operate a space heater.)
TP-Link’s RE315 is a good extender for anyone who wants to boost a network, add an ethernet jack to another room wirelessly, or install an access point in a prewired home.
Most Airbnb hosts will want to provide Wi-Fi access. Setting up a guest network that lets visitors connect to the internet but not to other devices on the local network (like your printer or your own computers) is usually the way to go (see our favorite routers for more). If the signal from your existing router doesn’t reach into your rental unit, you may need an extender like the TP-Link RE315, the top pick in our guide to Wi-Fi extenders. Of the extenders we tested, this model offered the best combination of price, range, speed, portability, and physical connections. Keep in mind that your guests will need good bandwidth to stream content without hassle or delays: If you want to be sure they can stream ultra-high-definition movies in addition to normal traffic, at least 50 Mbps is ideal (30 or 35 Mbps should be fine, if nobody is streaming 4K). If you do buy your own router and/or modem, keep in mind that if you’re a remote host with no regular access to your rental, your internet provider may not be able to quickly troubleshoot if issues arise; in these cases it may be worth just renting equipment from the provider.
The redesigned Chromecast player offers an intuitive interface, intelligent search, a useful remote, and support for 4K HDR video (including Dolby Vision).
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If you want guests to be able to access their own content (like their Netflix and HBO Go accounts) with a TV you already own, we recommend getting a Google Chromecast, which delivers content from a phone, tablet, or PC to any TV. It’s a better, more secure choice when a bunch of strangers are doing the watching.
Many guests may be happy watching their favorite shows on their own devices. But if you’re buying a TV specifically for a vacation rental unit, you can check out all of the TVs we recommend. From there you can pick something that works with your space and budget. We also have advice on the best TV wall mounts and best soundbars.
Transparent LED Film Products Any rental space should be stocked with key safety equipment: a fire extinguisher, a smoke detector, and a basic first-aid kit.