Home swapping comes with many benefits. Photo / Getty Images
More luxurious than camping, better than staying on a friend’s sofa, and you can travel with your whole family for a lot less money. It’s time to enjoy the many benefits of a home swap holiday, writes Clio Wood
Post-Christmas and the summer break, purse strings are usually tied a little tighter. But hotels are expensive. As are, come to think of it, Airbnbs these days. Camping’s not for me, while glamping seems to defeat the purpose of under canvas, back to basics. That’s not to mention the cost of transport to get there.
Allow me to suggest holidaying differently this year, with home swapping.
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A tad more luxurious than pitching a tent or cadging a spot on someone else’s sofa, much more room than trying to squeeze a whole family into a hotel room (not to mention fewer issues with snoring) and you can usually take the whole gang away for less than the price of a short-haul short break for one.
Home swapping is perhaps my favourite form of travel. It works like this: find someone to swap your house with. Agree a date, simultaneous or otherwise. Book your travel. Swap. It’s as easy as that.
Since not all destinations allow travellers to house swap on a visitor visa, it’s also important to check for any rules or restrictions before teeing up a swap.
You’ve probably seen the film The Holiday – gorgeous and talented Hollywood faces swap homes and lives with unexpected consequences: hilarity (and romance) ensues. While the film gives us the happily-ever-after version of home swapping, what’s it really like?
Here are my reasons to home-swap this year –you might just like it and the chances are you’ll never look back.
The cost of travel is rising. But that doesn’t mean we stop yearning for holidays – in a cost-of-living crisis, even for the most comfortably off, that’s not always an easy equation to solve.
Home swapping can be done totally free (hit up friends on the other side of the world or join a Facebook group dedicated to linking up potential swappers), but I’d recommend joining a home exchange platform to help you organise your swap. You pay a membership fee, but this is usually about NZ$300-$500 a year that is easily made back on even one short break exchange.
Travel isn’t all about the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower. Sure, they’re fun to have on the bucket list, but once you’ve seen them, then what? You’ll take a picture, post it to Instagram and drop it into conversation with your work colleagues when you get home. Your kids won’t even care. With home swapping, you’ll get to know a place properly and that place might be one of the big hitters like New York and Paris or the beaches of Thailand, or it might not.
The beauty of home swapping is that your eyes are opened to other possibilities. Would you pay to stay in a hotel in an unknown small town in Belgium? Probably not. But would you swap homes there with a huge, architect-designed mansion with its own tennis court and indoor pool down a gated drive? We absolutely did.
Home swapping lets you experience the quirks of your destination. In Belgium, we loved the way the cycle lanes proliferated, so kids felt more confidence and independence on the road. The pretty town architecture, which wasn’t headline-grabbing but quietly pleasing and so different to our own. We got to know our favourite bun in the bakery and learned how the train system works.
And while you’re easing into the routine of a resident, you’ll get to know people better too. Not only those at your destination, but those whose lives you’re inhabiting. The residents might be a little bit baffled as to why you’re holidaying in the middle of nowhere, but are friendly, not jaded by tourists and happy to chat.
You also have a relationship with your hosts that you don’t get at a hotel. From our hosts in Sigtuna, Sweden, we learned what time to hit the mini golf before it gets overrun, secret wild swimming spots and how to operate the cranky microwave.
But you also might discover a shared love of murder mystery books when exploring their bookshelves, or diving into the playroom, that their kids are obsessed with the same toys as yours. It gives you an extra sense of connection, which is, let’s face it, what travel is all about.
I don’t know if I can emphasise this point enough. I love travel. I have kids. My kids usually come with me when I travel. Most hotels still don’t seem to know what needs to happen to make families comfortable on holiday. Especially when they’re not millionaires.
Swapping lets you into a whole home; pick carefully and you’ll have bedrooms (and kids’ equipment) for everyone. Enough said.
Talking of kids, mine usually clamour for souvenirs at every attraction we go to. It’s not their fault (hello consumerism), but it is a challenge. Often gift shops are as big a part, if not bigger, than the main attraction. As weak parents, we’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve caved in and allowed the purchase of a perfectly useless piece of tat that gets forgotten about, then lost in the toybox, then thrown out in a fit of irritation in predictable six-month cycles.
With a home exchange, the focus is less on the stuff and more on being there. Yes, we like to stay in nice places (a clifftop villa swap in Bali put the neighbouring five-star hotel in the shade), but once we’re there, there’s less pressure to tick every expensive attraction off the list.
In a global climate of upheaval, it’s good to know that kindness exists. Nowhere is it more alive in travel than with home exchange. Home swapping engenders trust. You allow others into your home and in turn you are allowed into the homes of others. It’s hard, under those circumstances, not to double down on kindness.
You’ll usually arrive to a note or gift and the house prepared for you. We found the well-stocked kitchen cupboards of a foodie house in Kent, England, particularly exciting and helpful because we hadn’t brought supper with us. And we always leave a thank-you bottle of wine and a heartfelt note when we leave.
And let’s face it, if you’re the kind of person who’s open to home swapping, slipping into the life of a stranger or extending your own home to people you’ve never met, it brings out the best in people. I think that’s just the thing we need right now.
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