Interesting! We have friends who have rented out rooms via AirBnB at their ranch/farm. Decent house. The people do get separate bedrooms but no private place to lounge around except the rooms. They train horses so they have horses of their own and a large arena and horse trails that you can also hike on. I don't know if they make the horses available to people. They also have chickens and rabbits. It might be fun to stay there if someone is looking for a bit of a farm experience. However, they are about 30 minutes from the nearest town and more like an hour from beaches or anything else one might consider touristy. I don't know what they charge.

We have done some free hosting via Couch-Surfing. My husband and I like to bicycle and have done short multi-night trips on our bikes a few times. So we mainly host cyclists going up/down the coast as we can relate to them although they tend to be more our kid's ages. it's been interesting. Some of them, I'd be glad to host again anytime. Some...not so much.

However, we've never actually stayed with someone else. We are fair-weather cyclists and prefer camping.

When we went to Europe in our youth, we did the thing where you just show up in a town via train and someone at the station has a list of homes with rooms to rent and they call to see if there's an opening and off you go. Most of these were extra rooms, like the kid away at college. It was really enjoyable. Those seem harder to find across The Pond so we've not done that in years as they were increasingly taken over by hostels or people who seemed to be more in it for the money than for the fun of hosting people. I wish we could recreate that experience. Sitting in someone's lovely garden, eating breakfast with them, while discussing politics and cultural differences. It was great! Times change, I guess.

The European experience you describe sounds absolutely ideal, for that time and place. Lucky you to have done that when you could. It doesn't work so well when a family of five lumbers in!

Oh, I'm sure, LOL. Good memories!