Martha writes:
'I’m a third year Journalism student from the University of Sheffield. I’m writing a feature about home exchange for a finance magazine aimed at the middle class that I’m producing for my course. Home exchanging will be presented as a great idea to cut down the cost of holidays in these tough economic times.
I’m hoping to include some real life stories from Home Base Holidays members who have done home swaps, and hear more about how the process works'.
If you can help her out (brief answers are fine), Martha would really appreciate it (we'll also give your current exchange offer extra publicity in Home Swappers Newsletter and on the blog). Please email your responses to [email protected] and your message will be forwarded to Martha. With your permission, we can also provide Martha with a link to your listing so she can copy a photo of your home to illustrate her article. if you are willing to participate in a longer over the phone interview please let us know so Martha can arrange a convenient time to call you. Thank you.
Martha's questions:
- What attracted you to the home exchange idea?
- Where did you hear the idea?
- How many home exchanges have you done and where was your favourite/most interesting place you’ve been?
- Please tell us a little more about this holiday.
- Have you encountered any problems during a home exchange?
- What would you say to people who may feel strange going and living in someone’s house?
- How do you feel about people living in your house?
- How do you prepare for someone coming to live in your house?
- Why do you do home exchange?
- Do you think this is a good option for people who are suffering financially but would still like to have a break?
- How do you compare it to the cost of a standard packaged holiday (paying for flights and accommodation)?
- Would you recommend this holidaying idea to other people? Why?
- Are there any negatives to the home exchange scheme?
Excellent points - thank you for your comment. I'm sure it is true that doing home swaps does motivate many members to take more care to ensure their homea are kept up to a good standard in the knowledge that home exchange visitors may have high expectations. However, many members would be keeping their homes in equally good condition whether arranging exchanges or not.
It is certainly true that many home exchangers own upmarket homes and that saving money is not generally the prime motivation for doing swaps. However, even amongst the relatively well off, certainly in large cities like London where housing costs are extremely high, a good number of homes offered for swaps are small, modest flats. Although some members with grander homes do want to swap to similar, we find with Home Base Holidays members that many are not particularly bothered by this and will swap with anyone offering a home in the location they want as long as it's big enough to accommodate them.
Thanks again for your comment - a good topic to go into further in a separate blog post as it would be interesting to get feedback from home exchangers from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances.
Posted by: Home Base Holidays | July 15, 2013 at 11:54 AM
Interesting thought, I'm too late to reply to Martha but I found (10) interesting. It all depends where you start from I guess but I wouldn't say that any travelling is going to be easy in tight financial circumstances and given the high expectations of standards by home swappers doing it really cheaply might not work well. Looking around the listings on home exchange sites it's clearly the comfortable middle class who dominate in this area, they are leveraging off their assets. Whilst that keeps costs down it's still not as cheap as say camping in Cornwall unless you have already put a fair investment into your house and are planning on driving to wherever you swap to.
There might well be space for a more budget style but whilst this form of travelling keeps costs down I don't think you should realistically expect to do it on a shoe string. We spend a fair chunk of money every year in painting and upgrading our house and it's doing the house swaps that focuses our minds in doing this- mostly because it gives us a deadline!! Obviously we also benefit from the work we do and the house maintains its value but I do look at our home through critical eyes a lot more than I would if only we had to live there. Looking at the houses we swap to they are generally of a fairly high standard too with no obvious economic constraints. I think I might even argue swapping is more for the family with a big mortgage or a comfortable pension with grand housing plans who likes to stay in the same.
Posted by: Mrshobiejoe | June 30, 2013 at 08:16 AM