SOUTH BEND —After learning in August that her stage 4 colon cancer had resumed its aggressive growth, Notre Dame football fan Megan Hughes and her family wanted to make a final game day memory around their beloved team.
Megan’s family has been avid Notre Dame fans since her grandfather, James Curran, earned two degrees from the school and played on the 1938 team. They drove in from Maryland to attend the Sept. 30 game against Miami (Ohio), and on that Saturday, the university gave them a pre-game tour of the stadium and locker room, where they solemnly slapped the famous “Play Like a Champion Today” sign at the bottom of the locker room steps.
Making the trip with Megan was her mother, Caroline Hughes, brother, Matt, and Kurtis Michaud, Matt’s friend and fellow Fighting Irish fan. Three weeks before the game, the foursome could have rented two hotel rooms for the weekend at a cost of about $1,000. Instead they jumped on the Airbnb website and booked a home in the 1400 block of Cedar Street, within walking distance of the stadium, for about $100 more.
Megan, 42, had assumed they would stay in a hotel like she had on her first three game visits, but they surprised her with the house when they arrived in town.
“It made it so much more relaxing,” said Megan, who was still feeling the effects of her chemotherapy treatment the day before. “If we were to get a hotel we would have had two rooms and we really wouldn’t have been able to be together as much. We had a living room where we could all sit down together and watch TV or get our plan together for the day. We had a full kitchen where we could make breakfast. They had a fire pit outside and grill where we could make some burgers.”
The home’s proximity to campus also was a huge plus.
“You got to see South Bend more because we could walk to and from,” she said. “You got to know more of the neighborhoods and really see more of South Bend, which I loved. It made it so much more like you were really a part of being there that weekend.”
Such experiences are driving a huge trend in college football towns, including South Bend, as more people opt for short-term rentals. Part of the same web-based “sharing” or “peer-topeer” economy that has made Uber a common form of transportation, these rentals are changing the way people spend their leisure time and, on the flip side, creating lucrative ways for homeowners to supplement their incomes.