International Home Swaps: Environmentally Friendly Travel?

Cheaper air fares in recent years have given those of us lucky enough to be able to take advantage many opportunities for travel to far off places. The growing number of travellers who combine a home exchange with generally reasonably priced flights has enabled many to have much cheaper, and sometimes longer, vacations abroad than would have been possible for most a few years ago.

Home exchange is a very 'green' type of travel in that home exchangers make use of homes that would otherwise be left empty while the owners are away. This is preferable to staying in hotels in tourist areas (where such developments often, ironically, contribute to spoiling the beauty and damaging the environment of popular areas). Home exchange also enables visitors to get a much better feel for a real, rather than mainly tourist, community.

Writing an earlier post this week (Home Swap Locations ...), in which I had suggested that visitors swapping homes in Winnipeg might also like to travel north to Churchill, Manitoba, to see the polar bears, was a sad reminder, however, of much recent publicity on the even more rapid than previously thought phenomenon of global warming. This is already seriously affecting the polar bear population and could lead to their extinction (just one example) unless we and all governments are prepared to do more now to drastically cut down on the widely acknowledged part human activities play in the emission of greenhouse gases. For home exchangers, this could mean considering more home swaps closer to home to reduce the number of, especially long, flights (as air travel is the most carbon intensive way to travel) but also, when we do decide to fly, there are some small ways in which we could at least help counter the damage caused.

Friends of Conservation is one organisation which funds various fuel efficiency projects. Check out the calculator on the site, in which you can enter your location and the destination of your flight to calculate the distance and give an idea of how much you might donate to plant trees that will help soak up carbon or to support projects.

Comments

[RobertW.]

I came across your post when searching for ideas for different ways to travel. I subscribe to some travel newsletters (mostly American) and was rather despondent at how each one (in their new years resolutions type issues this week) said nothing about the impact of so much air travel and mainly looked at how to find the cheapest fares. So your post was a nice change. It's time everyone involved in travel became more aware of the damage we are causing and tried to do something about it. btw I had not heard of home swaps before but will now definitely think about doing this.