What’s the Best Sleeper Sofa for a Vacation Rental?

Ah sleeper sofas. No one ever wants to get stuck on a sleeper sofa when staying at a vacation rental. And yet, they are an integral part of any property on Airbnb or VRBO.

Why? Typically your vacation rental legally can hold 2 people per bedroom plus 2 additional people. So a three bedroom can hold 8 people, for example. And where are those two folks who don’t get a bedroom supposed to sleep? The sleeper couch of course.

Traditionally, sleeper sofas have been extremely uncomfortable and prone to breaking. Our sleeper sofa in our Sonoma property broke a bunch of times after about a year and was the source of guest complaints. After a while, it broke completely. Those regular ole sleeper sofas just aren’t built for regular usage.

So, we bought a Room and Board “Day and Night” Sleeper sofa. It has a heavy duty internal sleeper mechanism built by American Leather. These sleepers are built like tanks and also have a tri-fold memory foam top. It’s still not super comfortable, but it’s much more comfortable then a traditional sleeper. American Leather also sells these sleepers and their sleeper mechanism can be found in some other brands as well. Here it is in the living room of our Kauai place:

Also, Room and Board makes beautiful furniture in general. The downside is that it’s extremely expensive! 

These sleepers cost about $3000. For our place in Hawaii, we had to buy one new from Room and Board and then ship it to Kauai (the delivery fee was a flat $1400 of the entire order so we added a few more things to the shipment). For our place in Sonoma, we found an almost new one on Craigslist for $1300 in San Francisco and then paid the Lugg moving service $200 to take it up to Sonoma. This delivery fee was well worth it because these sleepers are very heavy.

Of course, there are probably other great sleepers out there in the market, but I recommend the Room and Board Day and Night sleepers because they look good and the sleeper mechanism is extremely well built.