In May 2020, Pacific Grove ended their program for allowing a small number of regulated short-term home rentals, for example those booked on sites like Airbnb and VRBO/Homeaway. Now you have to book for 30+ days if you want to stay in a home.
If you're a family traveling with kids and like to cook them breakfast and be able to hang out in another room when they go to bed – NO HOME RENTALS FOR YOU!
If you and some friends would like to stay and explore our coastline together – NO HOME RENTALS FOR YOU!
If you'd like to travel affordably with a couple of generations of family, like aunts or uncles or grandparents, plus kiddos – NO HOME RENTALS FOR YOU!
If you feel uncomfortable with all the shared/communal spaces in a hotel property and would like a place only you will enter – NO HOME RENTALS FOR YOU!
A handful of houses that the city cannot ban are available because they're in the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission. Those are very nice, usually super-fancy houses, sometimes with ocean views. They're also quite expensive.
So the only option in PG is to book with a hotel or motel or BnB (and they are the ones that funded the change to end all the home rentals in town that they could...surprise, surprise). Home rentals like us charged less, so having us out of the picture helps hotels force visitors like you to book their rooms AND lets them charge you more.
If you do want a home rental, the place to do it is in Seaside, which is about a 20-minute drive to PG. They are the only local city in the area left with a fair homesharing program. Then you can drive into PG for our lovely beaches, etc.
Local restaurants and business, for the most part refused to speak out to help preserve homesharing in PG, even though they rely on your spending. So it's hard for me to recommend them as destinations – except for Passionfish restaurant and Grove Market – which were always very supportive. Ironically, PG relies on visitor spending through bed taxes and sales taxes (the city is working hard to raise those, BTW). We'll see how all that works out for them.
So please follow my blog, stay in touch and share this with anyone you know who loves to visit our coastal paradise and can't afford to pay a ransom to hotels to do so. We will always share our home with you!
XOXO
~Mel
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