For the second time since 2021, the proprietor of a Fairhope horse farm where you can overnight in an Airstream has been named Airbnb’s most hospitable host in Alabama.

A visit to Fairfield Farm bears out the verdict of the scores of visitors who’ve left a long, unbroken string of five-star reviews: The facilities are charming, and the host brings an unusual personal sparkle to an experience that’s often handled through impersonal text messages and emails.

Rachel Clarke said she finds it all gratifying, but a little mystifying. “I’m not out there marketing myself,” she said. “I’m really not doing that.”

“I don’t really get it,” she said. “It’s just happened. For some reason we must make people feel like they’re at home or something. I don’t know what it is. Because it’s not me, it’s the guests.”

Her life isn’t what she expected: “It’s not what I thought my world would be,” she said. “I thought my farm would be full of horses but it’s full of people.”

But she talks a lot about her people, and they talk a lot about her in those five-star reviews. Those stars are what got her ranked as Alabama’s most hospitable, a ranking that Airbnb posted in 2021 and again this month. To be recognized as a state’s most hospitable, a host had to earn at least 100 reviews with 100% five-star ratings for cleanliness, check-in and communication. Out of the 50 hosts who got top honors in 2023, only three were repeat honorees from 2021, and Clarke was one of the elite three.

“It’s incredible,” said her husband, Uli. “Rachel is still at 466 all five-star reviews. Never had four stars, we never had three stars, we never had two, we never had one.”

The couple’s road to this point has had some unconventional turns. Horses were her passion, and she specialized in dressage and dressage training. She was operating a horse-related business in Robertsdale in 2001 when he turned up as a visitor at the farm across the road, where she was keeping a couple of Danish warmbloods in quarantine after importing them.

He’d grown up in Berlin, but in his mid-20s he’d visited Australia and ended up staying there. In 2001, he was traveling the United States as an antique buyer, collecting items to ship to Australia. At the start of the journey he stayed in hotels, he said, but he got sick of the uneven quality of the experience, not to mention the aggravation of having to use a different coffee maker every day, so he switched to an RV. That turned out to be a significant step toward the shared future they didn’t know they were going to have.

He went back to Australia, and she visited. Developments in her life, including the death of her father, brought her to a turning point, and he invited her to come travel the country.

“I went for six months and ended up staying a year,” she said. “It was the chance of a lifetime. It’s a beautiful country.”

They later moved to south Florida, where she had horses again, but Hurricane Marie forced them to evacuate in 2014. Back in Baldwin County, something jumped out at her.

“I went in the Piggly Wiggly in Fairhope, you always see somebody you know there,” she said. “And I hadn’t been back in ages. And I’m walking up and down and all these people are smiling at me and it’s just friendly, and it’s not like that in south Florida … and I walked down this aisle and I hear somebody go, ‘Rachel?’ and I turned around and it was somebody I knew and they ran up and hugged me and were like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I was like, ‘I’m moving back here.’ It wasn’t because of that one person, but it was that feeling.”

Teamwork was at play, and a give-and-take. They made their home in the loft above the barn while they renovated the two-bedroom home on the property. When it was renovated, she didn’t want to move into it. She liked staying right above her horses. (There’s a 21-year-old Danish warmblood stallion, Duval; a miniature horse named Teddy; and a 25-year-old mare named Waverly. She dearly loves to introduce them to her guests. “They’re part of my family. I love them,” she said.)

Clarke had driven the move to Baldwin County. But it was Uli who came up with the idea of making the cottage a rental property. They weren’t crazy about the idea of long-term rentals, so he suggested Airbnb.

“It just took off,” she said. “We started getting people from all over. And Fairhope. People who, during COVID, just wanted to get out of their house. They were sick of being locked away.”

They began adding sites. And where the cabin is conventional as can be – a two-bedroom house with the feel of a nice beach cabin – the new ones weren’t.

The three other sites on the property consist of one Airstream Safari travel trailer and two Airstream-like Fleetwood trailers: A Travelcader and a larger Avion. They’re parked on slabs, and two of them are covered by full roofs. Each is surrounded by landscaping and each has an sheltered outdoor living room/patio area where guests can lounge with a little more elbow room, cook on a grill, and watch TV or the flames in a fire pit. There’s also a communal pavilion.

The smaller trailers seem cozy for two people but can sleep up to six, and Clarke said they seem to appeal to a wide range of clients. Sometimes it’s people who are thinking about buying an RV but want to try one on for size. Sometimes a family will squeeze into one hoping to break through the sense of separation that can develop when everyone in the home has their own room to go to and their own phone to get lost in. A lot of times, of course, it’s just people who enjoy the novelty of a silver bullet travel trailer augmented by rustic amenities, such as pick-your-own blueberries, herb gardens and the horses.

It’s all very neat, but Airbnb’s honors go to the host, not the site. And despite her aversion to self-promotion, it’s clear that Clarke brings a personal touch to things. She mentions her habit of getting on the phone with guests before they arrive. That’s not necessarily the norm: bookings often are handled entirely through texts and emails, and that’s the way many clients like it.

“People don’t listen to voice messages anymore,” she said. “I’ll leave a voice message and I won’t hear anything so I’ll text them, and then I’ll send another text through Airbnb and I’ll kind of be cryptic, I’ll just say, ‘I need to talk to you.’ They’ll finally call me back and they’re like, ‘What do you want?’, some of them will say. Or they’ll say, ‘Are you calling to tell me something is wrong?’ And I’ll say ‘No, I’m calling to say I want to wish you a safe trip and find out what time you’re coming.’ And they’re so surprised, most of the time. I get a lot of feedback from that.”

Airbnb has had its ups and downs and its share of criticism. One gripe among some users is that they have to pay a cleaning fee atop their reservation, and then they’re expected to do cleanup tasks themselves in addition. That is not Clarke’s approach. She and Uli draw on their own experience as travelers, which leads them to a “no-chore” policy for guests.

“We traveled around Australia for a year in a motor home, Rachel and I,” said Uli. “We stayed in a lot of hotels. And we know what it takes to make people happy when they travel all day and want to stay somewhere. I think chores are just terrible. Why would you want people to wash your bedlinens and do the dishes? It’s part of the service. You’re providing a service. A hotel doesn’t ask you to put the glasses away, or clean them, because nobody would clean them properly.”

Add to that the fact that Clarke’s ideas about cleaning are meticulous, bordering on obsessive. Uli said that where hotel housekeepers may spend half an hour on a room, her cleanups take four or five hours in the campers and six hours in the cottage.

“I’m not going to lie. I’m really tired,” she said. “It’s really hard to find someone to help me with the cleaning, because I’m particular. … It’s a lot of work. I feel like I need a vacation.”

But there are compensations. In the cottage, she opens a guest book where someone took the time to draw a scene of the property. There’s a black-and-white cat sitting next to a gate, amid a splash of fall colors. It’s personal. “That cat patrols the outside edge of the property,” said Rachel. On the next page, someone left an enthusiastic tribute to the blueberry muffins that Rachel bakes for her guests.

“That’s the kind of people we get,” she said. “They come here to go to the beach, they come here to go to Fairhope and all that, but they end up really unwinding and getting back to nature, really, even if they’re not nature-y people.”

She makes sure she’s available to them. “I always take the time because I always learn something from them,” she said. “I still don’t understand why we have such nice people. I’m happy about that.”

She meets people she’d never have met otherwise. She hears the stories of their lives, stories she’d never have heard if not for the farm. On a weekly basis, she said, she gets updates from former guests about how their lives are going.

“Some things don’t work out the way you think they do,” Clarke said. “I can still have the horses and share that love, passion and knowledge with people, it’s just in a different way. And sometimes it’s hard, I think, for people to do that. But I think what makes it up is how nice our guests are.”

The Fairfield Farm Airbnb sites can be found via www.stayinfairhope.com. Prices vary with seasonal demand, size of group and other factors; as of July 27, nightly rates started at $169 for the Cottage and from $119 to $149 for the RV trailers.

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