Travel organizer Pallavi Shah, owner of New York-based luxury-travel company Our Personal Guest, had a client who yearned for a Currier & Ives Christmas in a postcard-perfect New England village. But she had to consider other possibilities because few appropriate properties were available. “Their owners wanted them for their own Christmas,” Shah explains. Her suggestion: taking over a small inn in Vermont or going to Newport, Rhode Island, which dresses up its Gilded Age mansions, offers haunted-house tours, and generally lays on the holiday theme with a flourish. (The client is still deciding what do to, including whether to take over the five-room, antique-filled Abigail Stoneman Inn for a cost of about $2,500 a night.)

Residential developments attached to ski or beach resorts may have availability as well. Often, these are owners’ second or third homes, and if they decide to be elsewhere, the houses may go into the hotel’s rental group. So a late booker might wind up with one of the townhouses at Topnotch Resort and Spa, in Stowe, Vermont, or a beachfront villa on the Pacific at the Four Seasons Punta Mita in Mexico. Hotel staff can provide meals, Christmas trees, menorahs, and other festive touches, and guests have access to the hotel’s spa, sporting, and children’s facilities.

The most conventional way to go is to book a hotel. But you can arrange for greater privacy by taking several rooms on one hall (or if the group is large enough, the wing or the whole property). That’s the plan of an extended family of eight traveling from California to London this Christmas, says Christopher Cowdray, general manager of the Dorchester in London. “They love London, and it’s a great time to be here,” he says. “There are carols and services in St. Martin’s and St. Paul’s, decorations everywhere, skating rinks all over the city.” To cater to the holiday crowd, the hotel puts Christmas trees in the rooms, brings in a choir to sing carols in the Promenade, and has a Santa give gifts to children on Christmas Day. It’s yet another benefit of leaving home—not having to put on that big red suit yourself.