Home swaps: ‘How dating for homes saved me £20,000 on holidays’

Inviting a stranger to stay in your home might seem like the opposite of a relaxing holiday, but for some travellers house exchanges are worth taking the leap of faith.

“It’s just like dating for homes,” Liz Barlow tells me.

Aged 70, the semi-retired management consultant has 31 home swaps under her belt and estimates she has saved more than £20,000 by staying in other people’s homes free of charge.

She and her husband Ivan Greenaway, 72, first began swapping their home in 2015 – but not without reservations.

Liz distinctively remembers thinking: “Will someone wreck my home? Steal my things?

“It’s a big thing to begin with, until you’ve done it.”

Their first swap took the couple to a detached bungalow in Australia, before a trip to South Africa, where they stayed in a clifftop house full of quirky wooden furniture.

But it is a house nestled in the middle of an Alaskan forest that Liz, from North Yorkshire, still dreams about.

“It was just stunning sitting on the deck, looking out at the trees,” she says.

“The two weeks we had, they had a heatwave.

“We went to the local state fair, the rodeo and, on my birthday, we went walking with reindeer – it was fantastic.”

For Liz and Ivan, swapping homes means immersing themselves in someone else’s way of life, something that can come with some unusual requests.

“When we stayed in Alaska, the [homeowner] told us what she wanted us to save if there was an earthquake,” Liz recalls.

“It wasn’t her family pictures, it wasn’t her jewellery, it was her quilting.”

The idea of home exchanges dates back to the 1950s, when teachers began looking for options to travel cheaply during their summer breaks, but for most people it was the 2006 rom-com The Holiday that brought it to the public’s attention.

It was the story of Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet swapping homes for the festive season that inspired Rebecca Pyatt to take the leap while she was teaching in the Seychelles in 2017.

“It just gives you a taste of going on holiday but experiencing other people’s lives and culture,” the 35-year-old says.

“You can go to hotels in Paris and Rome but it’s a bit artificial and you don’t really get to experience what it’s like living there.”

Rebecca managed to capture some of that Hollywood magic herself when she and her friends stayed in the same home used by cast members during the filming of the James Bond film Spectre in Mexico.

“It was a huge house, right on the beach and it had an infinity pool and its own chef,” Rebecca, who lives in Honley, West Yorkshire, says.

“It was incredible. The master bedroom was absolutely enormous and had a balcony and an open plan bathroom, you could see over the sea.”

Unlike with Airbnb, she says the process to actually start swapping is much slower, with a lot of time dedicated to building a profile.

“You’ll get more offers once you’ve been on the platform for longer,” she says.

“You can’t just book because someone has availability, everyone is within their rights to say no.”

While she has not had any negative experiences, Rebecca says there is always a risk of exchanges falling through last-minute.

Websites such as HomeExchange often offer members assistance with replacement exchanges or alternative accommodation if things do not go to plan.

Like many other travel firms, the company has seen an increase in business since the end of pandemic restrictions and now has 200,000 active members globally of which 5,600 are UK-based.

Public relations manager Jessica Poillucci said: “When travel returned we saw more and more people turning to home swapping.

“The cost of living crisis and inflation made travel feel unaffordable, and we saw a shift from Instagram-centred travel to people wanting to experience places like locals, home swapping offered a perfect solution.”

For people like Liz and Rebecca, home exchanges are based on mutual trust and “believing in the goodness of people”.

Rebecca says she is not concerned about theft or damage as “the benefits outweigh the risks”.

“The amount of money we save is probably a lot more than we would have to spend on repairs,” she says.

“I don’t have anything particularly sentimental, it’s all materialistic, it can be replaced when it gets broken.”

However, Charlotte Hindle, who runs travel media firm North East South West together with journalist Simon Calder, says home exchanges are her “idea of a nightmare”.

“It’s really hard inviting somebody into your home,” she says.

“I find it much better in terms of Airbnb, it’s a separate room or property that you can control and it doesn’t have your personal things around.”

To make the process smoother and safer, she advises people take stock of items within a home and consider insurance policies and risks.

“You don’t want to be in a situation where you are accused of taking something,” she says.

“If you didn’t know the people, you’d have to look at all the checks and balances in terms of safety.

“When was their boiler last serviced? Or when were their electrics portable appliance tested (PAT)?

“If it’s just your personal home you can sometimes let these things slide.”

Unlike simply booking a hotel room with a few clicks, home exchanges can be quite labour intensive, according to photographer Kate Abby.

“It does involve a lot of work leading up to it, such as extra cleaning beyond what you would normally do,” Kate, who lives in Pateley Bridge, near Ripon, says.

“When you go on holiday you can just shut your door and leave your bed unmade.”

But, the 53-year-old says, compared to more conventional travel methods, home exchanges give her family the opportunity to divert from more typical holiday destinations.

“Sometimes we go to places we wouldn’t have necessarily gone to because you are limited by choice,” she says.

“We went to a valley in the North York Moors, which isn’t far from where I live, and I’d never been and I wouldn’t have chosen it, but it was very lovely.”

Home exchanges may not be for everyone but for avid swappers like Kate, Rebecca and Liz, they offer a chance to go on holidays they would not be able to afford otherwise.

“We’ve been to see the brown bears fishing the salmon out of a river in Alaska, we saw beluga whales in Hudson Bay, Canada,” Liz says.

“We’ve had some fantastic experiences.”

Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.