Could house swapping be the (cheaper) way forward for journey?
- Home Exchange featured in the Christmas film The Holiday
- It now operates in 145 countries and has over 150,000 active members
- Could it be a cheaper way to travel for those with young families?
Christmas film The Holiday might not be the first thing you’d have in mind when planning a summer break.
The 2006 release, starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet, is about two women who arrange to a home exchange to escape heartbreak, and eventually both find love.
Home swapping enquiries rocketed after the film came out.
The website used in the film, Home Exchange, is still very much around – although there have been no home swapping marriages, according to its boss.
Big screen: The Holiday film catapulted home swapping into the mainstream
Romance aside, CEO Emmanuel Arnaud says his website has helped forge lifelong relationships between home swappers, and facilitated millions of fun holidays.
Since the pandemic, appetite for home swapping has soared as people turn to lower-budget and more eco-conscious trips.
With over 80 per cent of the market share, Home Exchange is well placed to capitalise on the demand. But how does it work, and is it really the future of travel?
While The Holiday catapulted home swapping into the mainstream, its origins go back much further to the 1950s.
It started off as a trend among European teachers, who wanted to travel on a budget.
There are now plenty of home swapping platforms, but Home Exchange was one of the first, set up in the 1990s.
Arnaud’s first experience with the website was in 2011. At this point a marketing manager, he tried to organise an exchange on the platform for New Year’s Eve between his native Paris and Florence.
Despite a ‘decent flat’ in Paris and most people away for the holidays, he could not find anyone to swap with him on the Home Exchange website.
As a result, he set up his own home swapping website, Guest To Guest, which introduced a point system to make non-reciprocal exchanges possible.
The website grew in France and acquired competitors, including the original Home Exchange, in 2017 before rebranding a year later.
Now the company boasts over 150,000 active members across 145 countries.
Emmanuel Arnaud launched Guest To Guest before acquiring Home Exchange in 2017
How does Home Exchange work?
Home Exchange is a relatively simple proposition. You can create a listing for your home for free, and then look for homes in destinations that pique your interest.
You can only finalise an exchange once you’ve paid the $220 (£172) subscription fee, which grants unlimited exchanges for a year. No money is paid for the swaps themselves, which instead operate on a points system.
Members can do a ‘classic’, or reciprocal, swap with another family, either simultaneously or on different dates.
They build up points by renting out their own home, and then use those points to spend on trips.
Arnaud also introduced ‘guest points’ to make it easier for members who don’t want to reciprocate.
The idea is that you can offer a member guest points to stay in their house, and they don’t have any obligation to stay in yours.
Are home swaps safe?
Although no cash is involved, it still requires a leap of faith to allow a stranger into your home.
Home Exchange says it has vetting procedures in place, namely the compulsory verification of an ID and a utility bill.
It has also employed AI tools to monitor the behaviour of new members, including their IP addresses.
‘There’s always fraudsters out there who are trying to be more creative… By and large, that’s not a problem we have, but we do have a [dedicated] team.’
Where Home Exchange’s oversight ends is the quality of the houses, but Arnaud says members should not expect luxury hospitality.
‘The fact it’s free hospitality means it is a very different type of relationship than you would have with a rental.
‘When you’re renting, you’re going to say there’s a view, the flat is this big… you’re going to try and sell that flat, oversell it so you can charge more.
‘On Home Exchange, since it’s free, it’s like when you’re having friends over. You’re going to put forward the things that might make it a disappointing service.
‘You’re going to say, it’s a really nice flat but sometimes it takes a bit of time to get hot water, the flat doesn’t have enough light.’
A quick scan of the listings shows very few members are quite so forthright, but if they are disappointed, or the exchange is cancelled, the Home Exchange membership includes protection and compensation.
Why do people home swap – and who does it?
‘I wasn’t an avid user but I just loved the concept,’ says Arnaud. ‘The vision I had was that it was such a cool concept, it’s just that people have to get used to the idea of letting people stay in their house.’
The prospect of swapping homes with a stranger is alien to most, which is probably why Airbnb has 150 million customers worldwide, while Home Exchange has 150,000 active members.
‘I think rental websites like Airbnb have paved the way to some extent for people to be comfortable hosting in their home. The fact that the industry has become really mature and it’s more accepted that you would…’
Its reach is likely limited. The customer base is small and skews towards middle-class families looking to save on their holiday accommodation.
Home swapping is also popular among empty nesters, parents whose children have grown up, and the retired.
‘They have a lot of time on their hands… they want to stay for free around the world,’ says Arnaud. ‘We have some people for whom it’s a lifestyle. We have people exchanging about 100 nights a year…. We’ve also seen an interesting growth of solo travellers recently, especially women.’
Cost is the primary driver, particularly in the current economic climate, and is why families wanting short-term trips make up most of Home Exchange’s customer base.
Longer stays, such as working holidays, can be harder to set up, Arnaud admits.
‘If you want to organise an exchange for three months, you have to find someone else who also wants to exchange for three months. It’s just more complicated to organise.’
In the UK, international trips make up 68 per cent of all bookings. However, the UK remains the most popular country to visit, followed by France, Spain, the US and Australia.
The average trip duration is around 10 days during the summer and closer to four the rest of the year.
That said, while Home Exchange might target a small group of would-be travellers, it expects to facilitate between 400,000 and 450,000 trips this year.
‘Ever since Covid, we’ve been growing very fast. I think part of that is because people really value being able to get out of their home… even if it’s not very far,’ says Arnaud.
‘Home Exchange is a great way to do that because you don’t have to pay for your accommodation and you can save a lot of money.’
‘I much prefer a home exchange to a luxury hotel’
Cían Caroll, 30, and his wife live in Cork, Ireland bought their house in 2019 and had considered Airbnb for times when they were away.
‘We bought our own home in 2019 and my parents also have a holiday home near the coast in Ireland that they go to in the summer. I thought we could move into there and do Airbnb on our place.
‘When we looked into the taxes it was a big turn off. We travelled anyway, maybe two or three times a year, and I was thinking we could save on accommodation.’
He had heard about home swapping from a friend of a friend, who ‘was a bit older and had kids’. He says it didn’t immediately appeal and ‘was a bit strange,’ but after turning their back on Airbnb, Cían and his wife made the decision to try out Home Exchange.
Their first trip in County Wicklow in 2021 was for a weekend and the pair were ‘super impressed’.
‘My wife was a little bit apprehensive first about having strangers in our home, which I think most people are. But it’s definitely a community. People understand the mutual respect there.
‘I actually much prefer home exchange now, even to a luxury hotel, it feels way more comfortable. We did parts of Fuji as a home swap and then the last three nights we stayed in a seaside luxury resort. It was obviously very expensive but it wasn’t half as enjoyable.’
The couple have now been on 18 trips and hosted around 15, with plans to spend two weeks in Californian home stays this summer.
Why not just rent your home?
For Cían, the savings made on Home Exchange compared to other platforms were the deciding factor.
He says the taxes and administration involved with listing his home with Airbnb weren’t worth it and opted for Home Exchange instead.
Airbnb has had its fair share of issues with its perceived impact on the short-term rental market, with a growing number of cities clamping down on short stays.
Vienna, Paris and Berlin are all imposing rules on the number of days Airbnb users can rent out their homes.
Home swapping doesn’t fall under these rules, but Home Exchange has still come up against hurdles.
In Scotland, home swaps were made exempt from short-term letting rules but not until after some lobbying.
‘We have very good arguments to give, showing Home Exchange does not have an impact on the price of rents. We don’t contribute to taking a unit off the market so that you can rent it out short-term. I think we’re great solution to have tourists in locals living seamlessly in the same places.’
Locals might disagree. The recent clampdown in Magaluf shows that it is as much about the behaviour of tourists than it is units being taken off the market.
Arnaud acknowledges the platform needs to be mindful of it. ‘I think as an industry we’re going to be confronted with this idea that there’s over-tourism in too many places. We need to spread out the number of tourists.
‘For us, if there are quotas on how many people can go on an island in a season, okay well we have tonnes of other people exchanging homes in other places.’
He is keen to explain how Home Exchange can be a voice in ‘responsible tourism’ and speaks at length about sustainability.
‘This idea that you’re doing something that is not a necessity but pleasure, and you’re emitting Co2 while doing it. It becomes more a question of whether you should be doing it or not.’
‘One of the things we’ve started doing is we’ve stopped proactively marketing destinations to customers which are very far away – though they can still search for them.’
Do customers care about sustainability, though? Not so much.
‘I think there’s a gap between what people say and what they do,’ says Arnaud. We do see a lot of people who are considering Home Exchange because they believe the way we are consuming is reaching its limits.
‘But that being said, the primary driver by far for any of our members is the cost.’
If cost is the primary driver, home swapping can be a great way to see the world all from the comfort of another person’s home.
Its customers might be devout, but for those who prefer to get away without worrying about the state of their own home when they get back, it might be a step too far.
