Why I love home exchanging
In early 2022, my family took a trip to New York City. It was early March, so we avoided the heavier tourist crowds. We also lucked out with the weather; it was close to 70 and sunny every day. Conditions were ideal!
I won’t go through all the details of the trip costs, but needless to say NYC is an expensive trip, no matter how you do it. Even though we drove and had a great rate on our hotel, we still spent over $2000 for two nights!! Granted we did a lot and ordered out for every meal for five people. But this was an epiphany moment for me. Travel at this cost would not be sustainable for my family.
As soon as we returned from our trip, I started researching alternative travel styles. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon some home exchange groups and membership sites. After a bit of research, I listed my home on a few of them!
If you’re unfamiliar with home exchanging, it’s almost exactly what you’re probably imagining. You list your home on a platform and make it available to other members, and you get access to the tens of thousands of homes that belong to other members. You pay a nominal annual membership fee and you can swap for as many nights as you’d like or as you can arrange.
In the past year and a half, we have stayed in eight different cities for free. With more than fifty nights of exchanges, we are huge fans.
There are so many things I love about home exchanging. Of course the cost is unbeatable. We pay about $200 per year and arrange more than 30 nights of exchanges. It saves us so much money on accommodations.
(Nearly) Free accommodations has a ripple effect on our entire trip. First, it allows us to have longer stays at our destination. With young kids, it’s wonderful to be able to stay somewhere for a week. It gives us the chance to settle in and see the area without packing everything into a few days. And since we have a kitchen, we often cook at the home and eat meals in, avoiding expensive to-go coffee and restaurant dining.
The kids’ room had huge closets filled with toys and legos, enough to occupy my kids for weeks!
Staying in someone’s home also allows us to pack lighter. I usually seek out other families with young kids for exchanges. Their homes are fully equipped with everything we could possibly need. Last summer we spent two weeks in Copenhagen and a week in Berlin, both in exchanges. The homes were immaculate, both had trampolines, and both had more than enough toys to occupy my kids. Most homes also have laundry facilities, allowing us to pack for 5 days max and do laundry when necessary.
In Copenhagen, our home was complete with soccer nets and a trampoline in the yard.
A less obvious advantage to home exchanging is an indirect connection to the local community. Most members provide a home manual with lots of activity suggestions from the resident family. In Copenhagen, the family that hosted us even left us a car seat for our 3 year old. We swapped cars as well, avoiding the cost of a rental car.
My favorite part about the home exchanging community is the trust that members place in each other. There’s a mutual understanding that people will take care of each other’s homes and leave the home as they found it. I have friends who have put their homes on AirBnB, only to return home to damaged furniture or soiled rugs. We have now had more than six families stay in our home, and each time we returned with very little indication that anyone had ever even been in our home. A few kitchen items were in a different drawer, but otherwise there was hardly anything out of place!
With all the positives, there are definitely some barriers to home exchanging. Not least of all is the amount of work that goes into preparing your own home. Before an exchange, everyone in my family packs up items that we don’t want guests to use. They go into suitcases and bins, which we then store in the attic. There’s a lot of cleaning and decluttering. Usually we reorganize dressers and closets to leave space for our guests to unpack. And then of course there is some discomfort and awkwardness with staying in someone’s primary home and having someone in your own home. There’s no way around having people in your space, so you have to be okay with that.
Home exchanging isn’t for everyone, and I’m not sure that it will always work for us. But at this phase in our lives, with young kids, when longer stays make trips better, it has really been ideal. It’s allowed us to travel much more than we would have before, and provided us with wonderful accommodations. It’s given us enough space for a family of five to spread out and relax. For the near future, we will continue to do home exchanges as we see the world!