Your Home, the New Frontier for Tourists in New York City Benjamin Norman for The New York Times TO RENT A town house available through One Fine Stay. Every time I see a tourist in New York City in July, I am taken with an urge to hand them a travel brochure for somewhere else. "Summer in Helsinki is supposed to be just great," I might say, to anyone who does not appear to be from Finland. As I write this, it is 94 degrees in New York; it is 63 degrees in Helsinki. And yet despite the significant climatic advantages of many, many other places, the number of visitors coming to the city each summer exceeds the permanent population by more than a quarter. Big City Book Club In honor of Nora Ephron, who died last month, the Big City Book Club will revisit her early work as a journalist and essayist. In the 1960s and "70s, she wrote for magazines like Rolling Stone, New York and The New Yorker - pieces collected in the anthologies "Crazy Salad" and "Wallflower at the Orgy." We're going to read "Wallflower" because it's more readily available, but if you're lucky enough to have an old copy of "Crazy Salad," reread it, too, and weigh in! We'll convene online for our discussion on Aug. 22. Bring your favorite one-liners. To become a member of the Book Club and receive updates about future chats, send an e-mail with the subject line "Join" to bigcity@nytimes.com. A duplex in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, available through One Fine Stay. Growth in tourism has been one of the Bloomberg administration's undeniable successes. Five years ago, the mayor introduced the city's first global advertising campaign, with the hope of bringing 50 million spendthrift visitors a year to New York City by 2015. That number was surpassed last year, with Brazilians, for example - one of the targets of the city's travel promoters - now coming in enormous numbers. As more and more hotels have been erected, the nicer ones have tried to distinguish themselves from the generic Starwood model. In March, the Out NYC opened in Hell's Kitchen to cater to gay tourists. The new Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a building built as a cooperage in 1901, offers rooms with bunk beds - for bands or, presumably, multiple sets of twins. By the end of 2014, the city will lay claim to 36,000 more hotel rooms than it did in the middle of the past decade. There are new hotels now in boroughs Scandinavians have never heard of. And yet to some the very idea of a hotel feels fraudulent. Paradoxically, the rise in tourism has been accompanied by a growing global aversion to identify as a tourist. Recent years have witnessed the blossoming of what the travel industry calls "immersion" or "experiential travel." A movement that implicitly shuns sightseeing as bourgeois pillage, experiential travel is meant to sink you deep into whatever world you're visiting, pushing a vacation toward anthropology. The experiential traveler does not arrive at Kennedy Airport and immediately go shopping on upper Madison Avenue. She takes a drawing class; she rides the Lexington Avenue line at rush hour; she embeds, and presumably returns to Brussels or Seattle with an impressively nuanced understanding of the differences in commercial enterprise between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in the 20s. The interest in this kind of travel is, in part, what led to the opening here a few weeks ago of a potentially popular service called One Fine Stay. Having originated in London in 2010, it is a kind of virtual hotel service that situates guests in well-appointed houses and apartments when their regular occupants are elsewhere. Last year New York State passed legislation aimed at dismantling illegal hotels and certain short-term rentals managed as investments, but you are not breaking the law if you rent out a place you actually live in. Craigslist and various other online services that match renters and homeowners with those looking for accommodation offer this kind of shelter voyeurism, too, but those require patience, luck and a trusting heart, while One Fine Stay requires only money. It serves as the middleman, ensuring that the place you plan to stay in actually exists and is as described, and that the owner's Riedel wine glasses will be replaced if they're broken. The company seems to realize that people do not want to immerse themselves in another family's lifestyle to the degree that they use that family's towels. So high-end linens and bath products are provided in every space; so too is a locally functioning iPhone filled with the homeowner's restaurant suggestions. To greet the arrival of an Australian family at a four-bedroom town house that was offered for $900 a night on Washington Street in the West Village, minions for the company stocked the fridge with organic milk, chicken, corn and other groceries the guests had requested. What precisely was the authentic New York experience the Australians were about to receive? Arguably, the experience you get when you pay to stay at a stranger's West Village town house, or TriBeCa loft, is the reality of affluence as it is lived here, which is to say that even the affluent feel they can make use of an extra buck. Most of the year, a lawyer, his stay-at-home wife and three children live in the Washington Street house, a dwelling that was at once enviable and comfortingly imperfect, the furniture in some instances too big for the scale of the rooms, the kitchen perhaps six months away from feeling passé. The family was in the country, but the economics of the arrangement compelled one to wonder: Could they really afford to be wherever they were? And what of the couple who planned to rent out their Fort Greene duplex, with its lush garden and distressed leathers and ethnic-travel mementos? Who were they, and why didn't they have a television? Of course, this line of thinking submerges you perfectly within the mind-set of a certain kind of New Yorker, for whom there are few questions worth greater consideration than how the guy across the street managed to buy a five-story brownstone when he doesn't seem to leave for work before noon. This may be where One Fine Stay truly succeeds as immersion travel: it provides users with the opportunity to simultaneously covet and judge, to lust after the 12-foot ceilings and denounce the granite. If only it provided you with the owner's tax returns.