House swapping - has anyone done this?

[AlistairAppletonssexyscarf]

We live in quite a touristy bit of the country and we are considering doing a house swap as a holiday this year. Has anyone done this? Any good/bad stories? Tips? Is having pets a problem?

We did this a few times when DS was younger through the NCT, I don't know if they still do it.

Mostly it worked out fine - it was good for DS to have toys to play with and meant we could visit friends without imposing. It was exhausting trying to get the house clean enough and get ready for a holiday though.

Can you recommend some websites? The ones I find charge per night which doesn't seem in the spirit of the thing.

We live abroad in a nice place and I'm hoping to find a house near my family in a complete shithole of a city so hope someone will bite!

Yes, we did quite a few when the children were small. UK ones through NCT, France, Spain and USA through Intervac, which then charged a yearly fee. They were great! Didn't have to bring small child equipment if we're staying at a place that had small children, and staying in some interesting places, and of course saved money.
Never had a problem with abuse of our place, and only once thought I might give the bathroom (of where we were staying) a clean.

Found it easy to swap when living in London, much harder when we moved to a beautiful but not very known town. It also got harder when our children got a bit older as they started to feel funny about staying in what was clearly a teenaged boy's room, etc.
With the cleaning I started out being a bit 'extra' but then relaxed a bit and just made sure the beds had clean linen/ cleaned a shelf in the fridge / ran hoover and cleaned bathroom. For the money you save you could easily employ a cleaner as a one off if you want to make it easier on yourself.
On the whole, I would definitely recommend.

I did an AMA on this. So feel free to AMA that wasn't already asked there. 😉

We have been exchanging via Intervac, an international non-profit established in 1953, since the mid-1990s. Back in those days, exchanges were arranged by letters in the regular mail based off a paper catalogue that came out once a year.

We do one exchange of a couple of weeks or so most years (three weeks in Bordeaux coming up this summer!) and sometimes a cheeky weekend.

See my previous comment for a link to the AMA that I did last year.

Thanks so much. This is a great start.

Our kids are older now so equipment is not really an issue. But we are cash poor and our house is in the middle of a prime holiday area so it felt like it made sense to explore leveraging our asset, so to speak.

I’m off to read through the AMA, @samarrange. Thank you.

Thanks! I've just taken a look. No one in the whole of Birmingham wants to swap a house, or else it's such a lousy holiday destination they all gave up trying

We have a network through work. Absolutely love it. Especially now kids are at school and tied to the school holidays. Means we can go away loads more than we could otherwise afford and explore places we never usually
would.

The kids love playing with someone else’s toys, they have all the crap you need like plastic plates etc, they usually leave a lovely list of all their favourite places. I also often get ideas for storage/decoration from other people’s houses. It is a bit of a mission cleaning enough to be guest ready before holiday, but the flip side is you come home to your house clean and tidy and usually some flowers and chocolates.

If you're willing to look after someone else's pets you can get free house sitters through House Sitters. I plan to look after undemanding cats in the future when we no longer have our own pet.

We have used house sitters in the past as we have cats. In fact we have a lovely family coming to our house while we’re away for half term, which is what made me think we needed to explore the two-sided option. I’ve had a quick look at one of the sites mentioned and am quite excited. There seem to have quite a few people with French holiday homes offering them out for swaps which is amazing.

Oh yes most people we’ve done it with have had cats!

I’m now trying to persuade DH into a holiday in Denmark.

Lots of people would find Birmingham a great central location. Americans will love that it's only 20 miles from Stratford-on-Avon and a mere 300 from Edinburgh. 🤣

Rather late to the party but we use homeexchange.com which has plenty in Birmingham!

We did two when the kids were little. One to California, which was fab, and one to Canada, which was OK.
For the Canada one they had massively oversold the house and it was much smaller and darker than the pics would suggest. We also came back to find that the people we swapped with had very clearly been through our wardrobes and worn some of our clothes!
Didn't do another one after that.
DS2 also used to get too upset at the thought of other people playing with his toys (neurodiverse) and it got too much like hard work to store/ lock everything away!