The vacationing couple from Hattingen, Germany, showed up at Michael Naess’s shipshape Queens apartment at the end of February. They had never met before. Nonetheless, here they were, digging into scrambled eggs, sipping coffee and chatting companionably with him on a Saturday morning. A German radio station, plucked from the Internet, rendered a flavor of home.

The couple consisted of Dark Bontkowski, 52, a test driver for a German shock absorber maker, and his girlfriend, Martina Held, 48, a graphic designer for a financial newspaper. Mr. Bontkowski mentioned that, implausibly, he is a test driver who owns no car of his own. It was a needed expense reduction after he got divorced. He pedals to work on a bicycle, 22 miles each way.

The couple was occupying Mr. Naess’s spare bedroom for 10 days.

Awkward, but not really awkward. They were paying guests.

Over the past 10 months, Mr. Naess has had a parade of 72 strangers living with him, respondents to his overture of: “Beautiful room for rent in Astoria” on the website Airbnb. They have drunk his beer and indulged in his muffins and dirtied his guest towels. They have come from Italy, Canada, India, South Korea, Belgium, France, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and so on and so forth. Among the so forth are the domestic bookings: Austin, Tex.; Waterloo, Calif.; and Washington, D.C. Members of this international bazaar, usually in pairs, have stayed from two nights to a month. Mr. Naess may bump into them in the mornings; then they might intersect in the evenings, decompressing together in the living room. For the most part, they glide past one another.