With the cost of living rising, it can feel like holidays may be out of reach, but with a little outside the box thinking, travel both within Ireland and abroad can soon become more affordable with sites like HomeExchange – think of the movie “The Holiday”.
The idea is that you put your home up on the site, set the places and dates you’d like to go somewhere and find homes/families you’d like to swap with. If you can’t find anyone to swap with at the same time, in what they call a reciprocal exchange, the site also offers a reverse lookup feature for multi-directional swaps where you can search for people interested in coming to your city and see if they want to stay while you’re away. If that doesn’t work out, you can also gather guest points before you go by either hosting people when you are at home in a spare room or while you are away visiting friends/family or on a different paid holiday. Once you have the guest points you can then use them yourself another time without needing to organise a reciprocal exchange.
Cost
You can sign up for free until you are ready to make your first exchange. Once you are ready to do a swap or host someone there is an annual cost of 149€. This gets you unlimited exchanges, member support, assistance in case of cancellation or non-compliance and property damage coverage. You can read more about the terms and conditions of these here.
HomeExchange gifts you guest points for completing certain steps of your sign up process. When I first signed up I got 450 points as a sign-up offer, 350 points for completing my profile, 350 points for completing the description of my home and 100 points for signing up, for a total of 1,250 points. And if you sign up with this link we both get an additional 250 points.
To give you an idea of what this will get you, most homes are available for between 100 and 250 guest points per night. So 1,500 guest points will get you 6 nights of accommodation at the higher end of the scale or 15 nights at the lower end of the scale.
Guest points are decided based on the size of home, amenities and location.
If you’re looking for a family holiday in Ireland this summer, for example, you could be looking at 210€/night for a two-bedroom apartment at a family-friendly hotel or a minimum of 100€/night for a home on Airbnb. For a week that would cost you between 700€ and 1,470€ for 7 nights. If you were up for camping, it would bring the cost down to about 200€ for a week but you’d also need to dish out for the camping gear if you don’t already have that and be up for camping.
Range/Selection
We’ve had our home up since 2019 but didn’t get to use it until this month due to the pandemic. In that time we’ve had offers from people in Spain, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Italy, Australia and Guadeloupe and that’s without even putting availability up for our home.
The platform is still growing but already has 450,000 homes in 159 countries listed.
On HomeExchange there are 263 homes in Ireland available to accommodate 2 adults and 3 kids in July with 37 of those being secondary residences, which are easier to organise an exchange for Guest Points in. Or 337 homes if you’re looking for just 2 adults. So for the 149€ sign-up and the gifted guest points, you could very likely find a week’s holiday in a fully kitted out home for a family of 5 for cheaper than the camping alternative!
Primary residences
Secondary residences
Benefits
Some of the benefits that HomeExchange offers that you don’t get through normal paid accommodation options is that you have access to family homes with all the mod cons including – depending on which you choose – kids toys, play structures, laundry facilities, a spice drawer and condiments etc which can save on both packing and cost – I don’t know about you but I find it sucks having to buy mayonnaise and spices on a 2 week holiday only to leave them behind us barely used – both on the cost and waste perspective.
If you go down the guest point route and stay with other people (often for reduced points), you also get to meet other people and get a proper insight into local culture which you wouldn’t get if you were on your own. In some cases, people also lend out their cars or drive you around.
Another benefit compared to renting out your spare room for money is that you don’t incur income tax and can typically stay in high-cost places for much much less using built-up guest points or direct swaps.
Effort
Like anything, there are pros and cons. 3 of the main cons are:
- Finding someone to exchange with can take some time
- Getting your house ready for guests before your holiday
- Cleaning your house when you get back from holiday
If you’re looking for a reciprocal exchange or even if you’re looking for a guest point exchange, it can take a bit more time and effort to find one compared to a straight booking for paid accommodation. It can typically take 10-15 requests to find someone to swap with. This effort can be really worth it for high-cost longer stay places like all of Ireland at the moment, London, San Fransisco or Paris for example but might not be worth the effort for cheaper places where you could just pay for a place and be done with it. One workaround here, as mentioned above, is the option to do a reverse lookup to find people that are interested in your home, you could have them stay for guest points and you could use those guest points in another location.
Another con is that getting your home ready for an exchange adds a bit more effort to your holiday prep. You need to have your house clean and beds made up for guests before you go on holiday if you’re doing a reciprocal exchange and then need to clean the sheets and make up the beds again when you get home. You can agree with your guests what you’d like them to do before they go, some people ask that you wash the sheets for them while others just get you to strip the beds and leave the sheets on the floor. I think I’ll just get spare guest sheets so that we don’t need to have the sheets washed and beds made up on the day/night we return home and just need to pull out our own clean sheets.
Insurance question
After reading through the terms and conditions, I’m not clear on 2 things:
- Can people who are renting use the platform (due to not having their own building cover insurance in place)
- Do I need additional non-standard home insurance to ensure full damage coverage (as one of the conditions of claiming is providing proof of home insurance and when previously discussed with my provider I was told I’d need non-standard cover to protect our home for both primary residence cover AND unknown guests while we are not here)
I have an open question with HomeExchange on this and will update this post once I hear back.
Our experience
We are hosting our first guest this week for 3 weeks. We reduced our guest points by a little less than half to “rent” out our spare room. Our guest is an 18-year-old international student here on a work experience to learn English. In exchange, we get guest points which we plan to use for our stay in France next Fall for the Rugby World Cup. Looking at Airbnb, this could save us over 2,000€ for the 2-week stay we are planning to take. Will let you know how we get on.
Another option for the site would be to work remotely for an extended period of time from another place. We’ve had an offer for example from someone in Spain to do a semester from September to June in their home while their family comes here to learn English. We weren’t up for that particular offer but may look for a similar offer next winter.
Again, if you’re thinking of giving HomeExchange a try, please use this link and get 250 extra guest points on signup.