Now that we have options for places to stay when we travel thanks to Airbnb, we’ve become accustomed to ignoring hotels as an option. Unfortunately, that means that booking a place in a pinch using the Airbnb-only approach leaves us roomless for the most part. If you’ve ever used the service, you know that you need at least a few days, probably a week, of lead-time for finding the right spot.

The process of contacting prospective hosts and getting all of your questions and answers out of the way is time-consuming but completely worth it. Staying in someone’s home has always been a preferred alternative for me, as I feel like hotels are too sterile for my liking.

Thankfully, the company believes it has come up with a solution for last-minute trips and booking and is launching a service today that it calls Match, to move the process along for these very situations.

Find me a place, fast

The new feature is woven into Airbnb’s existing product, and is aimed to help out those who are trying to find a place in under five days, or have had another booking cancelled or declined.

The way that the company explains the service is that you’ll set your criteria for the perfect landing spot, rate a few locations so that the service knows what you’re looking for, and it will help you write a message for the hosts.

After you’ve written your message, Match will blast it out to all of the hosts that fit your criteria and provide you with feedback in real-time as it comes in. For those that are on the road, Airbnb’s Match service will even message hosts on your behalf if you like.

Instead of picking rooms one at a time and messaging each host in that manner, the Match service will most certainly speed things up for you. If I still have enough time to pick through all of my options, I probably will, but I can see the service becoming the default for many people. It seems like the more automated and convenient web services are, the more the users will take advantage of it.

Airbnb says that the normal 20-60 minutes of browsing that average users take will be turned into more like 5-15 minutes with Match. That’s a huge time savings, plus the company says that those who leverage the option have double the chance of successfully booking a place to stay.

Booking a hotel is something you’ve always been able to do pretty quickly, but it comes with a price and lack of options. Every single time I’ve booked a hotel with a few days to spare or less, I’ve ended up at a place that I didn’t like at all, be it because of bad service or uncomfortable surroundings. I can see myself using Airbnb Match as an alternative the next time I book my trip.

➤ Airbnb Match

For those of you at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, you can rent a spot to catch some Z’s at the venue using Airbnb.

We’re all familiar with services like AirBnB which list homes that are available for short-term rentals. If you’re in town for a weekend or even longer, sometimes it’s cheaper to rent a room in someone’s house or the entire place.

Rentmix pulls together all of the short-term rental opportunities from HomeAway, FlipKey, and AirBnB and drops them all on a Google Map, using the Maps API.

The site is really well done and does a great job of letting you check out a bunch of rentals fast without having to click-through to external sites and pages. I personally don’t like staying in hotels, and would rather shack up in something that feels like home.

What, where, and when

When you visit Rentmix, simply enter the location you’re visiting, when you’d like to rent someone’s home, how many rooms, and the price range.

I can’t overstate how convenient it is that Rentmix searches available locations on three very popular services. I’m not a fan of HomeAway’s site, and really enjoyed the way Rentmix displays available homes.

The app shows the location you’re interested in on Google Maps using its API, and drops pins everywhere there’s an available location fitting your requirements. You can check out specifics on each home simply by clicking the pin. You don’t have to go to the originating external site unless you want to actually inquire about or book the property.

For me, the only things that Rentmix is missing is full integration of Google Maps, namely Street View. If I’m looking for a place to rent, I’d like to see what would be around me in the neighborhood, since it’s unlikely that I’ll get to visit it before my vacation or trip. It’s another API that the service can use, so I can’t imagine that integrating it would be very difficult. The other thing Rentmix is missing is something like foursquare’s API, which would tell me what restaurants and attractions are in the area of the rental. Those two things would help me make my decision much faster, and would make Rentmix more of a complete portal for these types of transactions.

Otherwise, this is a solid presentation of information that will probably save you a bit of time. Visiting each of the sites and navigating through each would take at least a half hour’s time on each site, so Rentmix does a great job bringing it all together.

If you aren’t a fan of hotels like me, jump on Rentmix and see all of the cool places you can rent short-term.

➤ Rentmix

Apparently hotels have had enough of our big fluffy white towel swiping antics. From now on, morals aside, you better think twice before walking out with a towel in your suitcase.

Linen Technology Tracking, a company in Miami, has patented a washable RFID chip that can be sewn into towels, robes and bed sheets, allowing hotels to cut down on theft and keep track of their linens amid rising cotton prices. The tags also allow hotels to monitor their linen inventory for re-ordering purposes.

In an interview with The New York Times interviewed Linen Technology Tracking’s executive vice president, William Serbin who said that so far 3 hotels in Honolulu, Miami and Manhattan are using the chip, but he wouldn’t disclose their names.

Since the Honolulu hotel introduced the technology last summer, it has saved more than $16,000 per month, reducing theft of its pool towels from 4,000 to 750 in a month.