How a Festival in Slovenia Made Me Build This Tool

Tolmin. Small town in Slovenia, right on the Soča river. Every summer Punk Rock Holiday takes over the valley. The kind of festival where you wake up with your feet in the grass and go to sleep when the birds start again.

We go as a group. And that changes everything when it comes to finding a place to stay. Festival camping works fine when you're twenty, but at some point you want a real bed, a kitchen, a table where you can sit outside with a beer without someone's tent in your face. A place in the village itself.

The problem is everyone who thinks like us wants exactly the same thing. And there are maybe thirty apartments in the entire village.

So I did what everyone does. I checked Airbnb. Refreshed. Checked again. Went to bed. Checked in the morning. Nothing.

In the end we got lucky; I happened to refresh at exactly the right moment and grabbed a place in the village. But it was pure luck, and I knew it. And somewhere between the music and the river I realised this problem isn't unique to Tolmin. As someone who works in IT I couldn't leave it at that. Why am I doing this manually? Anyone chasing a specific spot for a festival, a wedding weekend, a family reunion: they're all refreshing the same way I was. So I built something to stop doing that.

That's AlertBnB. Paste the Airbnb search you'd otherwise be refreshing by hand, and we watch it for you. The moment a new listing matches, you get an email, so the only refreshing left to do is checking your inbox.

If you're in the same spot, how to get notified of new Airbnb listings goes through every option, including the ones that don't involve us.