I cannot believe that I am so late to this game of home exchange which has existed for over half a century! If you love traveling and want to travel more economically especially if you have kids or a large group, home exchange might be the perfect solution for you! What is home exchange? Wikipedia has summarized it well: “Home exchange, also known as house swapping, is a form of lodging in which two parties agree to offer each other homestays for a set period of time. Since no monetary exchange takes place, it is a form of barter, collaborative consumption, and sharing. Home exchange can cover any type of residence including apartments, houses, holiday cottages, boats, or recreational vehicles. It can include an exchange of the entire home or just a room. The length of the swap can vary from a weekend to over a year. The swap can be simultaneous or non simultaneous. Home exchanges are usually arranged via specific types of social networking services, most of which charge a fee.” The fee is usually an annual membership fee which is right now around USD 100, nothing to compare with the hefty fee charged by Airbnb or VRBO for each transaction. Some networks offer the ability to collect a security deposit which will be released if no loss happens. The two oldest and dominant home exchange networks are Home Link and Home Exchange. In 1953 a group of European teachers looking to travel internationally economically during their summer breaks. That same year, teacher David Ostroff created a home exchange network called "Vacation Exchange Club" (now HomeLink) in New York City. In 1992, Ed Kushins started what is now HomeExchange.com after a home exchange experience in Washington D.C. In 1995, he moved the business to the internet. But I got into this business because of a new network called People Like Us which was started in 2018 by an Australian couple who wanted to travel overseas for three to six months at a time to improve their language skills and live the local life. It is claimed to be “the friendliest home exchange community in the world” and has a very supportive and active Facebook group where the founder is available for questions almost any time. I am a member on both People Like Us (PLU) and Home Exchange (HE), and I would like to share a beginner’s view about these two networks. However zealous me and thousands of others feel about home exchange, it is not for every one. I couldn’t believe that I had paid $400 per night on Airbnb over the years while we could have basically stayed at others’ homes for free. But not really for free, because rule No.1: in order to stay at others’ homes, you need to first or at the same time offer your home to others. It took me two years talking my husband into this home exchanging idea, which is, as I learnt later talking to other people, quite normal. I got it. Home is a private place, your sanctuary, full of your personal collections and treasures. Ask yourself or your partner hard about what really bothers you if opening up your home to strangers. It really boils down to the question of trust and a very valid question. All the networks have been trying hard to assure their users that they are covered if anything happens. There are tons of tips as how to select your exchange partners, but the key word is always communication: email, or video chats. Read through their profiles, look through the home pictures. Do your work, lots of work. So yes, home exchanging requires lots of time to do research, sending inquires and following up before finalizing. It’s not rare that you have to send 50 inquires before getting any positive response. If you need something within a week for sure, go for the hotel or Airbnb, because finalizing a home exchange can take months. HE has a much larger network, with homes almost everywhere. We found a house there at a beach town in Alicante area in Spain for a week, after trying fruitlessly at PLU, but I got valuable recommendations about places to go in Alicante from a local PLU member and we actually met up together with another local PLU member for a short afternoon. So for our family: HE=more useful; PLU=more friendly. But if you are empty-nesters and are not bound by time or destination, PLU would probably be enough. HE is much easier to get you started in the home exchanging game. When you sign up and complete the profile of your home, you will get loads of Guest Points (GP) from HE which you can use to “pay” to stay at someone else’s home without having someone else staying at your home at the same time. GP is the core of the concept for HE. Every home is assigned a value of GP based on many factors and the amount of GP you would “pay” to stay at a home is the nightly GP multiplied by the number of nights, unless it’s a simultaneous swap where no GP would be involved. You can purchase a limited amount of GP if your GP is not enough to stay at a home. I personally think GP is very convenient, but PLU wants to stay away from any kind of monetary-like system, so it introduces the concept of “globes”. Globes were rewarded to the first group of paid members only so the definite number of “globes” is very limited and does not change unless the founder decides to release more globes to the network. If you want to host someone but does not go to their home, you could earn a globe from them instead - if they have a globe and are willing to offer it. Reality is that not many people have globes, and because they are so rare, people only want to offer their globes to more exotic places instead of within the country. So PLU introduced another two concepts to address that problem:
HE works in a much similar way as Airbnb regarding booking and reviewing. Most people update their availability regularly and it’s easy to book. Video chats are usually not involved but they are pretty common on PLU. In the case of cancellation, HE team would offer help to find you a home within 50 miles (pretty large radius) or offer you $200 per night. Though usually not satisfactory for many users, it’s much better than PLU in my personal opinion where no systematic help would be offered except for the super friendly community of the PLU Facebook group who would offer their homes if available. But again, it’s hard to match the requirements of the original seekers of home exchange. But PLU is still so young and it has achieved acknowledgment in a stunning way. I know some people who have downsized their home exchange networks to just PLU.
I don’t have experience with Home Link and I think two networks are enough for our family. Airbnb also has a Facebook group dedicated to users who would like to swap their Airbnbs, and the Facebook group of world schooling families offers some house swap opportunities too, usually for a longer period and very family-friendly. So definitely join those groups if you are interested in home exchange. There are dozens of small questions to get informed before your first home exchange of course, feel free to ask me in the comments or answers are usually easy to find on the websites of the networks or their Facebook groups. Friendly warning: once you start it, there’s probably no way back to hotels or Airbnbs. Bonus: if you decide to sign up at HE, use my referral code to get both you and me some extra points! pingping-e7133 Home exchange veterans: as I mentioned above, I am a beginner. If there's anything that needs to be corrected, please kindly let me know in the comments, or simply share your opinions and experiences!
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