Home When Away
Would you hand over your house keys to strangers off the internet? Thousands of families do it every year – enabling them to holiday in beautiful homes all over the world for next to nothing UNLESS YOU’RE ON a business trip and have an expenses-paid hotel room to look forward to, the chances are your [...]
Would you hand over your house keys to strangers off the internet? Thousands of families do it every year – enabling them to holiday in beautiful homes all over the world for next to nothing
UNLESS YOU’RE ON a business trip and have an expenses-paid hotel room to look forward to, the chances are your biggest travel expense will be accommodation. Imagine how affordable holidays would be if you didn’t have to fork out money for somewhere to stay every time.
Well, the internet has come to the rescue. Clued-up holiday makers are rushing to sign-up to home-swap websites, which are currently doing a brisk trade thanks to the belt-tightening in the leisure sector.
Not heard of home-swapping? The idea is this: you pay an annual subscription to a company like Home Link or Home Exchange, who list details of your home (or, for the wellaboded, homes) online, with pictures, transport and location information.
You then log on yourself, surf through the several thousand other listings (in desirable locations spread across all continents), before emailing potential home exchangers to organise a week-long, month-long, even several-monthlong property swaps. End result? Your holidays are booked for the year. Total accommodation costs? Zilch.
For the truly dedicated holiday bargain hunters, there can indeed be some astonishing savings to make, as Julie Osborne, who runs the UK arm of Homeexchange.com, explains:
“To do a safari from England normally costs around £2,500. I went on one through our website and it cost me £300 for six days. Another story I heard was of a couple going to Canada to see hump-backed whales. A standard holiday to do that sort of activity costs £3,000. They just spent $80 for a day’s hump-backed whaling.’
The money-saving benefit of swapping homes with strangers speaks for itself. In addition to the savings on accommodation cost, cars are also sometimes swapped, meaning there’s no need for pricey car hire, and things like DVD libraries or sporting equipment are often thrown into the bargain. “For a family of five children, taking them all skiing could be exorbitant, unless you can exchange,” says Osborne. “And it’s not really practical having to carry the equipment so a trip with all the equipment already there is very attractive.”
Osborne launched the British Home Exchange website last year, after being asked by the company’s American founder, Ed Kushins, who had lived a few doors down from her while she was living in California, to take charge of the UK business. Kushins started his home-swap company in 1992, following a career in marketing; the web-based version went live in 2002 and soon enjoyed a massive PR coup when a starstudded Hollywood film, The Holiday – which casts Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as two women who swap homes over the internet and find love as a result – used the name of the website in the film.
“Before the film came out, we had about 10,000 listings,” explains Osborne, who runs the website from Barnstaple in Devon. “We were still at that stage the biggest home-swap site in the world, but then the movie made the listings grow considerably in the next couple of years –up to around 18,000.”
She says that after the obvious extra publicity harvested by Hollywood endorsement, she had expected the increase in subscriber numbers to taper off, but then came the credit crunch and new listings have shot up. “In the last year, it has gone up to 24,000 so it’s more than doubled in the last four years.”
The financial situation has been a friend to the home-swap industry, but Osborne is keen to stress that it’s not just about saving money – it’s also about avoiding tourist traps and seeing the destination through the eyes of a resident.
“You really do live like a local,” she says. “You see a lot of things that tourists don’t see and get to stay in lived-in homes, which offer a totally different feel to hotels.”
Home Exchange makes its money by charging a fee of £69.99 for one year’s new membership (two years costs £94.99; a renewal price for one year is £35). But you can also pay for ‘bronze membership’ (you don’t list your home, but can contact other people with homes on the site) or, for those lucky individuals with stunning properties, ‘gold membership’, costing £329 a year, including ‘mansions in Malibu and castles in Scotland’
While Home Exchange claims to be the largest home-swap website, Home Link is a UK-based rival that offers the second largest number of listings and prides itself on the service it offers (at £115 a year, it is almost twice as expensive as Home Exchange).
“Home Link has 27 different offices around the world,” explains Caroline Connolly, who runs the Winchester-based business with husband Jon. “They’re each run by an English-speaking local person: if you lose your car keys in Italy but didn’t speak Italian, then our operator over there could almost certainly help you out.”
Home Link has been growing at a steady rate of around 4% each year, but has ‘definitely seen an increase on that in the last few months’, most likely because of the global recession. There are 13,500 members in 76 different countries, with the US, the UK, France, Spain and Australasia particularly well covered. Curiously, Portugal, Greece and Turkey have not been enthusiastic about home-swapping.
Although the internet has helped the home-swap industry flourish, with the obvious ease it affords in accessing information about properties, the idea of home swapping is not new. Home Link was founded in 1953 by a group of American teachers from the East and West coasts who were spoilt for holiday time but had very little money.
Nowadays, Home Link’s membership profile falls into two distinct categories, says Connolly. “There are those who see it as an opportunity to save money on accommodation, people who often have school-aged families and who are tied to the academic year – rental house prices normally double in the six weeks over the summer. But there are also a lot of retired members who like the idea of the rapport that comes with swapping your home.”
Connolly says that many of the Home Link faithful end up swapping homes year after year and become close friends, but it has to be said that handing over the keys to your nest to complete strangers doesn’t appeal to everyone. Aren’t there some horror stories of people stealing family heirlooms or changing the locks and permanently moving in?
“Theoretically, there is the possibility of some abuse, but I think it comes back to mutual responsibility,” laughs Connolly. “If they’re in your home and you can pick up the phone and speak to them, then there’s a sense of mutual trust.” After all, presumably they could do the same back to you.
Both Osborne and Connolly claim that of the many thousand exchanges that take place every year, there are only ever a handful of complaints and they are never to do with wilful abuse. Sometimes, people cause minor damage to vehicles, especially if they’re driving on a different side of the road to the one they are used to, but mostly it’s about differing standards of cleanliness: what is clean to a young bachelor living in Paris is not what is clean to a well-heeled family from the home counties, notes Osborne.
Both websites advise their members to swap as many photos as possible and talk a good deal before exchanging to establish that you are the same kind of family with the same kind of outlook. Of course, the end benefit of a home exchange is that it could give you a whole new outlook on going away.
www.homelink.org.uk , www.homeexchange.com
Casestudy
BUSINESSWOMAN EMMA
CHALMERS admits her friends were surprised when she told them she was planning to open up the house she shares with husband Innes, a chartered accountant, and their two young daughters to complete strangers.
“Home exchanging is not for everyone. Some people can’t get their head around letting other people into your home and being in someone else’s.”
But she was totally comfortable with the idea. “The pros outweighed the cons. Ultimately, if you have something you’re really worried about, just lock it away or leave it with a friend.”
Since their first trip to Denmark in 2006, they have been on big holidays in Holland and Switzerland, and shorter UK-based breaks to Chester and Whitley Bay. Living close to Edinburgh airport has made it easy to jet away and, with two children, home exchanging via the Home Link website has proved very affordable.
“The best thing is the space. You’re getting a full house. It’s much more luxurious and more comfortable than staying in a hotel room.”
And there are added extras: “All the neighbours know you are coming so you have a ready-made network. And you just bond with the family whose house you’re living in. Even though you’ve never met them, you become friends.” Lee Cheshire
