AMA about home exchange holidays (we have done about 30)

[samarrange]

Anything you've always wanted to know about home exchange but were afraid to ask. We've been doing it since 1996 when our kids were little.

I'm interested in this! We live in an area of the UK that's a popular tourist destination. Do you do overseas home exchanges, or just within the country where you live? And do you do it through a company/organisation? Also, has anything ever gone wrong with an exchange?

We've been doing HE since 2019 so not as experienced but have found it to be really positive! Following with interest.

It seems to good to be true. How naice is your house? Ours is a bog standard semi in need of general updating. I have assumed house exchange was only for people who already have a big and well modernised house?

Sort of come out the other side of it tbh. Yes it’s amazing when it works but there really is no such thing as a free lunch. My first non house swap holiday for years was bliss - not having to leave the house like a hotel and no fretting about whether the stayers will like it or not.

That said our kids now teens are insanely well travelled and we have done way more travelling than we would have done. If you swap cars and a house you literally only pay the flights or very little if you drive. We live in a nice house in a tourist area though. Prob done about 20 swaps lost count.

I'm very interested in this for the same reason as @AllProperTeaIsTheft ! How do you find a home swap partner? How do you swap cars wrt insurance?

@TheaBrandt what happens if the home swappers don't like your house? I mean if things don't actually work, or it wasn't as advertised I can see their annoyance but if they just don't like it I would have thought they'd just suck it up given that they're getting a free stay...

We are with a non-profit organisation called Intervac, which has members all over the world. Go to intervac.org (that will redirect to a much longer domain name). They have been running since 1953. When we started there was a paper catalogue that came out in December and you got writing airmail letters straight away!

The only thing that went "wrong" with an exchange was when we got back home and had a nastygram from the Mum of the family we swapped with about not having cleaned her stainless steel countertops properly, and how our kitchen was "disgusting" (although the only evidence of that was one pan that had been put away after an imperfect clean). This was very ironic because they had been doing some work on their house and there was an unplugged fridge in their living room which was filthy as they had left it closed. It was their first swap and probably their last. You do need a bit of a "go-with-the-flow" mentality.

Not at all. Describe your place honestly in the listing and all will be well. UK listings are often quite funny because people write them as if they are selling the house, so it's all estate agent-speak. We have swapped with people with much nicer and much less nice places than ours.

Examples:

• A single mum in Iceland and her daughter in what was basically a council flat, but it was fine
• Someone on the outskirts of Paris who had started divorce proceedings between us agreeing the swap and turning up, so there was only half the normal amount of furniture.
• Another house in France with nothing in the fridge or store cupboards. Now some people swap their second home, but this was this couple's normal everyday home
• On the upside, a place in Belgium with a swimming pool, and a place in the Netherlands with an indoor swimming pool.

To find a partner, join a site or organisation. See my PP, we use Intervac.org, about £100/year but almost all the members are serious people and there are no stupid star ratings, only "Can we use you as a reference". Vey civilised.

For cars, it depends on the countries. In most European countries the car is insured for any driver, maybe with a small excess for a non-named driver, so you can either accept that, or send a copy of your licence and your partners may be able to add it to their policy for either nothing or a couple of Euros. For people coming to the UK, it's funny, the UK government has the most flexible rules about accepting foreign licences of any country in the world, but UK insurance companies have always been really snotty about "You must hold a full UK licence", even with EU licences pre-Brexit. You can generally add named non-UK licence holders but it's not implicit. For further afield, it varies by country.

Do you have to let them use all the bedrooms or can you leave some locked? Obviously clearly advertised. I don't really like the idea of someone sleeping in my bed

With the exception of the case I mentioned in my PP at 17:49, we have never been told by anyone that they didn't like our house, nor led to believe that they didn't. Maybe they spent the whole stay sticking pins in effigies of us, we wouldn't have known.

It's really not about the house anyway. The two huge advantages of home exchange are (a) it's cheaper — imagine your last holiday but with zero hotel or car hire cost — and (b) with kids, at least, it's a better holiday.

When our kids were 9 and 7 we swapped with a family from Los Angeles for 3 weeks. After a couple of days we went to the Disney store, where they had an offer: 5-day tickets to Disneyland for the price of 2, but the catch was, you had to go on five consecutive days. So we did. It took us 3 days to see the whole park, then on day 4 we did something else during the day and only went to Disneyland at 6pm. So we got to see all the evening shows and fireworks, which were brilliant but most people never see them because the kids are knackered by 7pm. On day 5 we decided to revisit our favourite rides and queue if necessary. The house swap was brilliant for this because after a full day of junk food and adrenaline, we could come home and eat a bowl of plain pasta or whatever, and the kids could sleep in their own room and look at the posters and toys of their counterparts. Our daughter made friends with the girl across the street (whose family had a pool) and they had a sleepover. Meanwhile the LA family's daughter had a sleepover with our daughter's best friend.

Another time we swapped with the US, the 18yo daughter of our partners became friendly with our neighbour's 18yo daughter, who was learning English (we were living in France at the time). The next year the neighbour's daughter went to the US for a holiday with our exchange partners. We paid for her plane ticket because our neighbour was a single mum and not well off, but we had saved so much on the holiday that that was no problem. The two daughters are now pushing 40 and are still friends.

You can do whatever you like. I think one time we had a house with a locked room with "Please do not enter" on the door. But in general if you are nervous about the idea of strangers in your home then swapping may not be for you. We like having people to house-sit when we are not actually swapping with them, not so much for security as to have someone to water the plants.

Fun story: On our very first swap, with partners who had done 5 or 6, we arrived at their house and opened the front door. While we started to unpack the car (we had driven across the Channel), our kids age 4 and 6 or thereabouts raced into the house. They came out with a whole load of Post-Its that they had collected, which our partners had helpfully applied to various drawers and cupboards in the kitchen and beyond, saying things like "Plates", "Cutlery", and "* OPEN WITH GREAT CAUTION *". So we opened all of them very carefully. 😂

This is a fair comment. We are doing a swap next week and deep cleaning of our place has already started. Although I guess having a properly clean home is no bad thing. (And most people don't mind. The absolute state of the kitchen we had in London in 2005... they people had just moved in, but even so, the grease was thick everywhere. And yet we still only have happy memories of that swap. You definitely need a generally pragmatic attitude to life.)

We do fewer swaps now than we did, but that's partly because we are more financially comfortable (especially since with no kids to take along we only need one hotel room). Where we live we get a lot of offers, so we are able to be choosy. But we do want to go back to Iceland, and not paying for a hotel and a car makes a huge difference there!

This is a fascinating thread OP. I have ummed and ahhed about this, but I have always assumed you need to live somewhere really desirable?

I live about 40 mins drive from some very popular seaside destinations, and 25 mins drive from the nearest sea. BUT I ultimately live in a normal town and I've just assumed no one would want to come here?

Not at all! Half an hour from the sea, you'll be beating them off with a well-manured stick!

I remember seeing a TV documentary about house swapping a couple of years before we did our first. A family from a terraced house in Huddersfield swapped with a family from Arizona. The Brits spent most of the time dying of embarrassment in their massive villa with a pool, driving a huge car, being invited to a BBQ with the neighbours — one of whom was an Arizona Supreme Court judge or something — while the Americans were all "Oh, this is so cute, we're so close to Strat-Ford", etc etc. Maybe they were putting a brave face on it as the four of them piled into a Ford Fiesta, but everyone seemed to have a great time.

We used to live in a village in France that was hard to find on the map and we thought "Who would want to come here"? But experienced house swappers think about regions, not cities. And also, they often have other holidays to do the major sights. The most common profession is teacher/academic, because they have lots of holiday time and appreciate being able to see new places that are not touristy, while also maybe doing a couple of hours of lesson prep for the next year while sitting in someone else's comfy chair.

Something else I just remembered is that you pick up a ton of ideas for decorating your home, which is something that neither I nor DP have any talent for. I used to think that you "had to have" matching armchairs and sofa, until we stayed in a Dutch home where they didn't. Or you might get to try out an appliance that you've either heard of and learn that in fact you don't want, or had never heard of and discover that you do want.

I am dying to do this. We live in France and have a pool but it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to come here in the summer - south east, boiling and not near the coast. Very tempted to just have. Go nd see what happens.

If you and the other voting members of your family are comfortable with "having strangers in our house" then I would say, absolutely go for it. Looking at the Talk/Holidays threads in here I think there are dozens of people who would go for your place. A pool, in France? Come on!

When we started doing home exchanges we were living in France and wanting to get our kids more time in the UK. We had done a couple of trips where we booked a "holiday cottage", but it was such a pain living in a place with 4 knives, 4 forks, 4 plates, 4 bowls, and maybe salt and pepper if the previous renters had left that. Then you do a home exchange and there are 8 plates, 11 knives, 10 forks, a complete spice assortment, and you're invited to eat whatever they didn't finish (or even open) in the fridge before they left. Plus DVDs (as was) and "new" toys for your kids.

Some counties are better than others. Germany Spain France are good but the quality of Italian houses is terrible would never swap there again.

It’s not for everyone. Many people thought we were mad. There are pros and cons. I’m not evangelical about it though. It’s a lot of effort. If you are low on funds have primary aged kids have a desirable house in an area of interest but most importantly are not uptight about your house then it’s worth it.

Now we have older teens we are more picky with where we go and are very much enjoying NOT house swapping.

Hi op, just wondering: What do you do with all of your clothes and stuff- so if they open your wardrobe and drawers is everything just there?

Clear a drawer and a space in your wardrobe. We have a room of shame that is not for swappers and dump clothes and stuff in there to make space for them.

Do you always swap directly or can you pool you home?

Do you have to pay a fee to join Intervac?

I am very tempted...we live in the UK's #1 overhyped coastal tourist paradise, but I'm a skint single mum in a (fairly nice, but not pristine) HA property. I have always toyed with the idea of AirBnB ing it for a few weeks in the summer, but the thought of cleaning it to the required standard fills me with horror 😬

Sounds interesting. How does it work with your home insurance or do you have to get specific insurance? What happens with breakages or damage?

Yeah, pretty much. But we do put the gimp suits in a bag in the garage. 😂

We also try to free up a drawer and a few coat hangers for our guests to be able to hang up their clothes.