What is Home Exchange?

In 2014, R and I bought a little 1-bedroom flat in the Merchant City area of Glasgow. The initial idea was that we would use it as an investment for the kids. We had just come out of an expensive 10-year fixed-rate mortgage deal (and rates had dropped significantly by then), and we were no longer paying money for out-of-school childcare fees. We had also rented lots of holiday homes via Airbnb, and we felt we had the experience to perhaps do something similar.

Then we stumbled upon the concept of "Home Exchange" and researched a few sites that offered this. We decided that our little flat might also be ideal for this as we had equipped it in such a way as to be a home from home experience (well as much as possible) and the flat was ideally located for visitors to Glasgow, as well as being nearby work for us to be able to pop in and out easily to look after it.

Home Exchange is a membership-based program which has an annual membership fee of between £110-180 per year, but this can easily pay for itself if you get one or more suitable exchanges. There are a number of safeguards in place via the system but there is also an element of trust and respect needed on both sides of the exchange.

Hosts can also mark up their home calendars for what type of exchanges they are interested in and when their home is available for potential exchanges. The full details of the exchange are not released to each of the parties until the exchange has been confirmed and agreed upon by both sides.

The hosts of homes will normally have a house manual or set of instructions for the person staying and the groups will communicate via the Home Exchange messaging system and via other routes too once the exchange has been confirmed. After an exchange, both parties then review each other and this also acts as way of demonstrating trustworthiness, overall experience etc.

Home Exchange works by you putting in your preferred holiday destinations, dates and the number of people in the group. There are various other filters that you can use, but the more filters you use, the less choice you are likely to have in terms of results. The aim is that you will find someone on the system with a property in the area that you want to visit who is willing to enter into an exchange with you for the dates that you are looking for. The more flexible you can be, the better your chance of getting a successful match.

There are 3 main ways that you can carry out an exchange:

1. You do a reciprocal exchange where you both exchange (or swap) at the same time i.e. you go to their property and they come to yours for the agreed dates.

2. You can do a non-reciprocal exchange where you will stay in each other's homes but at different agreed-upon times.

3. You do a guest points exchange (this used to be called a balloon exchange in the past). In this case, you let someone stay in your home and you earn a certain amount of 'guest points'. Note, you can also build guest points via the annual renewal, using referral codes, etc.

When you are working and have kids, your holiday times and holiday durations are quite restricted to school term, annual work leave, etc., and sometimes you are not able to find a suitable exchange that will suit you. So it can be a bit 'hit and miss' in some cases. That said, lots of families do this type of holiday exchange all over the world routinely. Some exchanges will also include the use of their cars. We have been fortunate in the past to have used our host's cars, but we are always a bit apprehensive in case something happens to the car when it's in our possession.

Using our flat for Home Exchanging, either for non reciprocal exchanges or via the Guest points route, allowed us to meet the most amazing people; have fantastic stays in locations overseas that we would otherwise not have been able to afford as a family and it allowed us to build up a bank of guest points which we are now using in our retirement. Ten years on, and we still keep in regular touch with a number of the retired couples that we met through Home Exchange (they may even be reading this, and if they are, they know that they were and are our retirement travel role models!).

We have two Home Exchanges arranged for the majority of our time in Bangkok. The current one is in a fabulous apartment in the Thong Lor area, which we managed to extend by a further 5 days when our hosts advised that they were staying in their current location (Singapore) for longer than anticipated. We have a future exchange scheduled for the Sathorn area over the Christmas and New Year period (where the hosts are heading to Hong Kong for a family Christmas reunion). I'm pretty certain we would not have been able to afford to stay in similar accommodation in Bangkok during the peak season and for the duration of time we are staying here if it were not for our Home Exchange Guest Points.

Home Exchange is a fantastic way to travel, and it suited us when we had the flat. We have never really considered doing Home Exchange for our actual home, although it would be slightly easier now that the kids are out the house but it's that old issue of there are various things that are needing fixing, renewed and replaced etc. so we're not quite ready or in a position to consider this at the moment but perhaps it's something we will look into again in the future. In the meantime, we shall continue to spend down our existing points balance and enjoy the homes that we are fortunate to experience through this medium.

So if this is something that you have never done before, maybe it's something that you might want to consider in the future...