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.

We have always swapped directly. On two occasions we got our partners' holiday home, but we knew that in advance.

I'm not sure what "pool" would mean here, but it's not some kind of timeshare thing. The catalogue/website mentions a possibility of "non-simultaneous exchange" but that has always seemed far too complicated for us.

As far as I know, it's the same as if you had guests staying with you, except you're not there. I suppose if our exchange partners accidentally burned down the house it would be between our insurance and their liability insurance. As long as you are going through a reputable site and no money is changing hands, you don't need the kind of insurance that you would if you were renting out your home on Airbnb etc.

There is an annual fee, around £100. Mostly that keeps the trolls and timewasters away, but also it pays for a national rep (often someone who is in the travel industry and works part-time for Intervac) who is there to be a human being on the end of the line. At one point they offered a free trial membership, but we ended up ignoring messages from them because it was usually clear that they were not serious enough for it to result in a swap.

I'm not sure what "the UK's #1 overhyped coastal tourist paradise" is, but I guess that if you are somewhere like Southwold you will be able to take your pick of a week or long weekend anywhere else in the UK, because you will get way more offers than you can accept.

Does the house need to be pristine? Cleaning is not a problem, but we have various ‘quirks‘ like lights that only actually turn on from one switch in a room not both, and some of the tiling is a bit unsightly.

Has anything ever went missing or got broken or damaged in your house? Did you ever get in trouble?

I have a friend who does this, they're in Sweden. I quite fancy the idea.
We don't have young dcs.
We're next to the north sea. We're moving to a more desirable house soon. I wouldn't swap with the house we're in at the moment as the street is pretty rough. But the new house will be very quiet with hardly any neighbours.

So many people ask like some on this thread if anything ever went wrong. So doom and gloom and salacious.

The issues with it aren’t actually the issues you think. I’m more anxious that they have a good time and like the house than that they will steal my teaspoons.

We had an Italian family who hated our house due to the carpets which they didn’t have in southern Italy they wanted tiles as their son had asthma or something. They were really cross about it and complained. Marred my holiday knowing they were pissed off. Most swappers loved our house the ones from LA wanted to swap again the following year but you are dealing with randoms so although the majority are nice some will be weird with weird view points.

Thanks OP (great thread!). By pooled I meant not a direct swap, but you answered that.

If I put my house up, when do I need to accept and use and offer. I’d like to understand the level of interest in our house.

We have a large house, but in a commuter town. It’s not exactly a pull to the wider world!

You post your house and you approach others and they approach you. If your house / location is desirable you get more and better offers. It’s like dating but for houses. If you have a basic house in an unappealing area your pool is smaller. If you have a beach house in Cornwall you’ll get better swaps.

Certain nationalities are more attracted Spanish and Germans are keen to come to England they want their kids to practice English so easier to get swaps with them than the French.

Don’t know what is going on with Canada I have had lots of Canadian offers this year. Sadly have no interest in going
there.

I’m keen…. now to persuade DH!

Thanks for this OP

What's the most unusual place you have stayed in

Only western countries seem to do house swap. For beginners I would start with Germany. The people are straight forward to deal with they have high quality houses and they love to visit England.

How clean do you leave the house? Are we talking hotel standard? We have a weekly cleaner, could this be offered as included in the stay or an extra that they pay for?
We also have lots of clutter but could probably shove this away somewhere

Do you have to own the house?

I'm in a rented villa in Cairo (view of the pyramids from my bedroom balcony, pool, 6 bedrooms...).

It would be jolly handy not to have to crash in family spare rooms/hotels on UK trips.

My landlady wouldn't know or care, & my housekeeper & baowab would probably love the novelty of a different family for a week 😁, but do you need to prove that you're the owner?

I’m really interested in this. My house is just a bog standard UK semi in a small Scottish town but we’re less than an hour from Glasgow and just over an hour from Edinburgh so maybe we would get some interest?

Used to be more relaxed but now people expect hotel standard. Before every swap I think wtf am I doing this? It’s what puts me off it now.

Not at all. You're not running a hotel, and every house has quirks. These days you can make little videos to show how to wiggle that door handle or reset the boiler when the power goes off or whatever.

What I would recommend is thinking about how dependent your home is on tech and maybe reducing that, unless your partners are sufficiently tech-y. We have quite a few smart lights but when we are away we unplug the main hub things and set them to just work on the switches. We did a swap with a house in Germany once that had a sauna, very nice, except that to switch it on and off you had to talk to Alexa in German. And using someone else's TV is a lot harder than it was when we started in the mid-1990s!

People will contact you and you will contact them. You can see on the map where they are. These days with e-mail there is no sense of obligation to reply to inquiries or offers, compared to when they arrived by paper mail, although of course it's nice to do so. Once you commit, though, you really, really shouldn't back out, even if you get a better offer. You can specify on the site which dates you are available for, but people don't always see/stick to those. So if your dream location comes up a week after you've committed to someone else who has bought non-refundable air tickets, the right answer is "Darn, we're booked for that period, how about next year?"

In terms of advance booking, I'd say around 2–3 months for a short-haul long weekend, 6–7 months ahead for a fortnight (when there was a paper catalogue it used to come out around Christmas time, which was ideal for a European summer holiday), and 18 months or more for a 6-week trip to Australia or the western US or other far-flung destination.

Regarding your commuter town, remember that most people with whom you will be swapping also live in commuter towns. You are not going to have an apartment overlooking St Mark's Square. What makes home exchanging work so well is that both families are in the same boat. A large house is a definite plus because a lot of swappers have 2 or 3 children, or might bring along an adult sibling who always wanted to visit Englandland, or whatever.

From conversations over the years with friends and acquaintances, I estimate that about one adult in three is up for it. That means one couple in nine (any social scientists present, please don't write in about correlation). The others are either skeptical or recoil in horror at the idea of "someone in our house". Our adult DS and DD are trying to persuade their DPs, with little success so far.

I don't think anywhere has been very unusual. Maybe the house in Germany where every room was on a different level, up half a flight of stairs and offset across from the one below, like a series of mezzanines. It had obviously been completely redone a year or two earlier, with all brand-new units, top of the range appliances, etc. But they had a really modest car and from the outside you wouldn't have a clue.

Oh, and one time in the Netherlands we had a water bed. I've slept on those in the US and they were firm, but this one you could feel the water sloshing around in it. It was comfortable one you were in it, but I kept injuring my knees getting on and off it.

Not hotel standard. "Parents-in-law coming to stay" standard, maybe. You are living in the house until the moment you drive off/leave for the airport, so it's normal that there is a half-full bottle of milk in the fridge, some butter in the dish, etc. We don't remove all the pans from the cupboard and scrub the bottom shelf where they have left marks. Everyone has a different level, though. We've never found anything that was worth complaining about. You're getting something close to a free holiday, after all.

Back when we had a weekly cleaner, we had her come in during a swap with an American family. This was pre-WhatsApp etc so we didn't get a report from her until we got back. She said that she had come in once, halfway through the swap, and the house had been a total tip. But when we got back you wouldn't have known that anyone had been in it (apart from the thank-you gift on the table), and it wasn't our cleaner who had put everything back, it was the guests.

On Intervac.org, at least, there is no need to prove that you own the house, or indeed that you even live there. It's done on trust. Pre-Internet you at least knew that paper mails were being delivered to the address, and these days you tend to have WhatsApp calls with your partners where they show you the quirks of the house. It would be fairly quickly obvious if it was a scam, I think.

(here was a TV drama once where a woman in the UK was having an affair with someone from Australia and contrived something with a house swap to sell their house from under hubby before leaving him. I forget the details, but it put friends of ours off house swapping even though it was an utterly contrived situation!)

We have swapped homes that we both owned and rented. We let our landlord know as a courtesy, but he didn't mind. Think of it as friends coming to stay, just that you aren't there. However, I couldn't say what the legal or customary situation would be in Egypt. I don't think we ever asked our partners if they were owners. Probably 90% were.

It is worth telling the neighbours that you are swapping, though. First so they don't report a burglary or squatters, and second because they may be interested in meeting or helping your guests. On one swap in the US our kids got friendly with the neighbours and we asked them round for a BBQ using the huge grill that our partners had in their house. We were a bit unsure of whether to serve alcohol in case the neighbours were uptight/evangelical types, but we needn't have worried. In fact we drank all the wine we had bought and the neighbours had to go home for more.

Absolutely! Scotland is a big draw for many Europeans (especially the French) and lots of Americans (and even more so, Canadians) are of Scots descent. If you do swap with North Americans, be prepared for them to put quite a few miles on your car, as they may try to go to Strat-Ford for a day out...

Well, that hasn't been our experience. Maybe you are swapping with people who think they are getting Airbnb standard with professional cleaning between visits — perhaps depending on the site you use, and/or their previous experience.

When we see that we are swapping with 3 or more previous exchanges on Intervac.org, we just do our standard full clean (which we probably ought to do more often, so the exchange gives us a good reason) and we know that will be good enough.