Home Exchange Holidays

[KickArseQueen]

Hello, I'm looking into visiting NZ with my family to visit transplanted relatives who we haven't seen for a very long time. There are 6 people in my family and the cost of travelling and staying for approx 1 month are looking really high. Someone suggested I look into home exchange, but I know nothing about it and would really appreciate some advice - actually ANY advice on the whole topic would be good!

Just bear in my I'm effectively trying to take my children on the holiday of a lifetime on a very small shoestring budget!

BUMP!!!! :)

There used to be a house swop section under classifieds with offers/requests for swops.
Also, MN have just started (what seems to be a very posh) house swop section (not a thread on here) have a look at their home page for it. There was a thread on chat about it earlier in week.

Where do you live that you would want to swop?

I'm wanting to do a holiday swap:) English countryside for North Island New Zealand, it all seems great there are lots of people in NZ who do it, I'd just like to know the in's and outs of it IYKWIM. I'll go and have a look, I really need advice!

Well I did a swop (via MN house swop thread) around 3 years ago and whilst it was great in that it saved us having to pay out for expensive hotel rooms, I'm not sure I'd do it again as there was the constant worry about having strangers in our house, particularly as we found out that originally there were supposed to be 4 members of a family staying in our house and later found out they'd invited lots of other random people to visit. We were not back to our house for a few months after the swop so had a long time to wait to check all was ok and when we got back we found there was a small amount of damage.

Fingers crossed you sort something out

Thankyou!!! :)

We've done four home exchanges and they've all been brilliant. We signed up with Homelink, costs about £120 per year.

Remember that the risk cuts both ways. You are trusting a stranger not to damage your house. At the same time, they're taking a gamble on you. We've stayed in lovely houses.

Once a family who stayed here ruined a bathtowel with hair dye. I was a little put out until my DH reminded me that for the cost of replacing all our towels, we had still saved a fortune. I think you need to be able to take that attitude, or it's not for you. Apart from that, we've had no bother at all

NCT has a free home exchange section. The Guardian newspaper also has a home exchange site that's only about £30 a year and seems to get a lot of recommendations. MN also have a site but unfortunately that doesn't really look so good and is about £199 a year.

Home exchanging is a great idea though.