Home exchange honeymoon

If you’d prefer to mingle with the locals rather than escape to a walled-off resort, or if you’re planning a cheap honeymoon, then look into a home exchange honeymoon.

In a nutshell, home exchanges involve swapping your home (or RV or yacht) with someone else—you go live in their house while they live in yours. Is it safe? That’s the number one question people ask about home exchanges, according to ExchangeHomes.com. According to the organization, which was founded in 1986, reports of property damage are rare, and it has never received a report of theft. That’s because home exchanges are built on trust: at the same time you’re living in someone else’s house, you’re living in theirs. Typically, home exchangers build trust by exchanging lots of e-mails, photos, and videos in advance of the swap.

Intrigued? Here is some additional advice on home exchanges from Wikitravel:

Home exchanging has numerous advantages, including significant savings on hotel costs since neither has to pay for lodging. Additional savings can be had when an automobile is also exchanged. And who doesn’t prefer a spacious house to a one-room hotel? Whether for a vacation, or a longer term sabbatical, a home exchange allows one to experience a vacation living like a native.

Unless you are exchanging a 5-star villa in the Caribbean or an apartment facing Central Park, finding a home exchange requires a little bit of effort and time. The most efficient way to arrange a home exchange is to search with a ‘reverse search’, which identifies who wants to come to your area.

The Internet has numerous websites that provide home exchange listings across the globe. You can determine how up-to-date the listings are by reviewing the proposed exchange dates – and good home exchange sites will include both the join and expiry dates within the descriptions so you know exactly how long each exchange offer has been in circulation. Home exchange websites provide a mechanism by which you can get in touch with other people interested in swapping homes. However, you are responsible for your own exchange arrangements.

To increase your chances of concluding an exchange you should post your home swap offer on several home exchange sites (look for those that include full contact details). Look for well established sites with a good choice of up-to-date listings in areas/countries you are interested in. It is recommended to post your home exchange offer several months before the dates you want to exchange homes. Compile an enticing exchange offer that includes details about your home, yourself, your destination and proposed dates. Periodically check home exchange sites for new home swap listings. And don’t forget to contact new members as soon as possible before they are able to conclude an exchange.

Once you’ve made contact and your potential exchange partner confirms their interest in your home, get to know them better by exchanging e-mails and agreeing to speak on the telephone. To reassure yourself and your exchange partner you should ask for and offer to provide references. Faculty will have additional questions related to logistics and course schedules; international programs offices can provide a lot of answers.

Clean and tidy your home before your exchange. You may also want to fix that leaky faucet that you’ve been meaning to get to for several months now.

Create a guestbook that provides information on using your appliances, local information (e.g. hospital, restaurants, grocery stores, transportation), and contact numbers (e.g. family member or friends, dentist, car garage).

For  an extensive list of home exchange websites, click through to the original Wikitravel article. Another good resource: the home exchange FAQ at ExchangeHomes.com.

Excerpts from Wikitravel are used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.