Want to attend the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in Birmingham this year, but you live just far enough away you need a place to stay?
Here are a few of your options for how to stay in the Magic City if you don’t already have something lined up.
Book a convention hotel.
The SBC annual meeting website (sbcannualmeeting.net) lists 36 hotels offering convention rates for the meeting. While the convention rate on rooms is available through May 14, some hotels are already full.
The hotels range distance wise from adjacent to the convention center to 14 miles away.
The convention management team is working to implement a plan for hotel shuttles and park-and-ride lots from local churches. They’ll release more specific information closer to the SBC annual meeting.
Parking and transportation became a challenge with the closure and rebuilding of I-20/59 over downtown Birmingham this year, but SBC leaders say the shuttle system should help.
To check out the list of convention hotels, distances and prices or to make an online reservation visit
sbcannualmeeting.net/sbc19/hotels.
Check out other options.
If for some reason you can’t find a convention hotel that works you might try going a little farther up the road to Trussville or Leeds and exploring hotels in that area. Hotels.com pulls up several options for under $100, and you could still take advantage of one of the park-and-ride lots at a church so you wouldn’t have to deal with parking downtown.
Try an AirBNB.
If you aren’t already familiar with AirBNB it’s an online site where people post photos of their home and allow you to request to stay there for a standard rate like a hotel.
Just like every person’s house is different every arrangement is different — you can rent a bedroom in someone’s house, a detached mother-in-law suite or a whole house or apartment.
This option may seem out of your comfort zone, but it’s not as unusual these days as it sounds — 6 million people a year travel this way.
In fact so many AirBNB hosts have gone out of the way to make their home a great place to stay many people now prefer this to a hotel stay.
Interested in giving it a try? Each homeowner is heavily peer-reviewed, sometimes by hundreds of guests, and you can read what people say before you book your stay.
Who knows? You might end up getting an opportunity to share Jesus with your host while you’re here too. To check it out visit airbnb.com. (Grace Thornton)
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