Your ordinary flat is somebody else’s month abroad.
Picture a flat in Lisbon on a Tuesday afternoon. Blue tiles behind the stove. A lemon tree on the balcony that is mostly pot. And a note on the kitchen table in careful English: the coffee is in the tin by the window, the tram stops at the corner, and the neighbour is Dona Fátima, who will talk to you whether or not you speak Portuguese.
The owners aren’t there.
They’re in your flat.
Reading your note. Looking for the coffee you said was above the kettle — which it was, until last Thursday.
That’s home exchange. Two households, two front doors, one swap of keys. Nobody pays rent. Nobody pays anybody.
And the first thing almost everyone thinks, before they think anything else, is: nobody would want my place.
They would. The couple in Lisbon don’t want a hotel either. They want a kitchen, a bus stop and a bakery that opens at seven — in Leeds, in Adelaide, in a suburb of Lyon that has never once appeared in a brochure. Your small flat with the good radiator is somebody’s month abroad. The spare room and the bike in the hall are somebody’s reason to come.
And because each of you is sleeping in the other’s bed, everyone is on their best behaviour. You water their basil with a devotion you have never shown your own. They clean a hob you have never cleaned.
A hotel room is built so that nobody seems to have lived there. This is the opposite: a home somebody loves, lent to you for a while.
You lend your home, and you borrow one. That’s the whole mechanism.
The classic version is a straight swap on the same dates. You fly out, they fly in, and for two weeks each of you lives the other’s life.
The catch is the calendar. The family in Lisbon may want your flat in May, while you want Lisbon in October. So most platforms let the swap happen in two halves: they come to you in May, you go to them in October.
The biggest platform goes one step further, with points. Your home earns them each time another member stays in it, and you spend them on any other member’s home, anywhere. The couple in Lisbon don’t have to want Leeds. Somebody on the site just has to.
It’s still an exchange, all the way through. Nobody pays, nobody is a customer, and everyone who sleeps in your bed has a home of their own listed on the same site. The points only keep count of who has lent and who has borrowed, so the dates don’t have to match.
And a second home counts, if you have one. Holiday cottages are some of the most sought-after swaps there are, because they’re empty half the year anyway.
Everywhere people live, which is the point.
The big platform alone lists homes in well over 150 countries. There are farmhouses in the Dordogne with a pool nobody mentioned. Loft apartments in Buenos Aires. A wooden house on a Norwegian fjord, a bungalow in Queensland with a gecko included, a terrace in Brooklyn, an old stone house in a Tuscan village of forty people and one bar. City flats by the thousand, mountain cabins, beach houses whose owners want to spend February somewhere with snow.
Northern Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are the deepest. Southern Europe is close behind. And the long, patient swaps — a month, two, a whole winter — happen most of all between people who aren’t tied to a school calendar.
A whole home. A kitchen you cook in properly, a sofa that’s yours for a month, books somebody chose, and a bed that isn’t trying to look like every other bed.
A neighbourhood. Not the old town — the bit around it where people actually live. Their baker, their market day, their walk to the river.
Often a car. Many members swap cars along with the house, and a car left in the drive of a farmhouse is the difference between a lovely week and a very long walk.
Sometimes a garden, sometimes a cat. Most swaps come with nothing to look after. Some come with tomatoes to pick, and a few with an elderly cat who will sit on you whether you’re a cat person or not.
Space for everybody. A four-bedroom family house costs exactly the same as a studio: nothing. Which is why families and friends travelling together get more out of this than anybody.
A welcome. A note on the table, a list of restaurants, a bottle of wine in the fridge. Hosts do it because someone did it for them.
One membership, and there’s no rent on the stays themselves.
The established platforms charge somewhere between $100 and $250 a year, usually with unlimited exchanges included, so the second trip costs nothing extra and the fifth even less. A few newer ones are free to join and earn their money through service and cleaning fees on each stay instead — which is cheaper for one trip a year and dearer for three.
Then you pay what you’d pay at home anyway: food, the odd train ticket, your share of the electricity if you’ve agreed to it.
For scale: two weeks in an apartment in Paris, Sydney or New York rarely costs less than a whole year’s membership. Usually it costs several.
Photograph your home on a sunny morning. Clear the kitchen table, open the curtains, and show the view from the window even if it’s a car park. Honest pictures get more requests than flattering ones, because people trust them.
Write about the neighbourhood, not the square metres. Nobody chooses a flat for its floor area. They choose it for the bakery, the park, the bus that goes straight to the centre. Tell them where you’d take a friend.
Get verified, and fill in everything. Profiles with a photo of real people, a real description and a few sentences about who you are get answered. Empty ones don’t.
Be flexible the first time. Say yes to a quieter month, a less obvious town, a points stay rather than a perfect swap. The first review is the only hard part, and it’s hard for about one exchange.
Start with a short swap close to home. A long weekend with a member two hours away — same language, nothing to lose. You find out what to leave on the kitchen table, and you come back with the review that makes every later request easier.
Video-call before you agree. Ten minutes on a screen tells you more than forty messages, and it’s where the swap stops being with a profile and starts being with Ana and Tomás.
Because on the second morning you go out for bread.
Nobody sent you. You just know where the bakery is now, and that the woman behind the counter has already decided you’re the people staying at Ana’s. You carry the bread back past the same three dogs, make coffee from the tin by the window, and take it out to a balcony that isn’t yours and has somehow started to feel like it.
That’s the thing a hotel can’t sell. Not a room — a life, lent to you whole: someone’s chairs, someone’s view, someone’s route to the river. You don’t visit the place. You borrow it from somebody who lives there.
And back home, in your flat with the good radiator, someone is doing exactly the same.
None of this is a reason not to swap. It’s the list we’d want handed to us.
Walk round your own home and take three photographs: the kitchen, the best chair, and the view from the window you like most.
Then look at them as if you’d never seen the place. Somebody, somewhere, is looking for exactly that — a quiet kitchen and a good chair in a town they’ve always wondered about — and they have a flat with a lemon tree to lend you.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
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One new way to travel. Every Thursday.
Not deals or destinations — methods. House sitting, night trains, repositioning cruises, and what each one really costs.
More ways to travel
Work Exchange
A few hours a day at a hostel, a guesthouse or a family home, and the bed is yours — in a town with a metro at the end of the street. Our son did it in South America and stayed ten years.
Read article →Caretaking
House sitting’s long version: a lodge, an estate or a ranch that needs someone for a whole season, and sometimes pays for it. The job is the place, not the cat.
Read article →Farm Stays
A few hours’ work a day on a farm, and a bed and dinner at the family table in return. Pick grapes in Portugal in September and again in New Zealand in March.
Read article →
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