Make yourself at home... anywhere

MY friends recommended home-exchanging. They’d been swapping houses with people all over the world, three to five times a year.

Their summer holiday was a home exchange; as were mid-term, Christmas and Easter. They developed friendships with people in other cities and would head to, say, an apartment in uptown Manhattan for a weekend. Out for dinner one night, they recommended it to us.

I went on the home-exchange website. Some of the properties were beautiful, others not, but there was a huge variety from all over the world.

For five years, I did nothing. It wasn’t that I had a problem with strangers staying in my home (which rules out home-exchanging for many people). I have faith in humanity, and the concept of people doing it for themselves. My problem was a character flaw. I am not organised. Every year, I put holiday-booking on hold, until, finally, with the sniff of back-to-school in the air, last-minute panic ensues.

One bleak January evening, after another meal with our friends, I checked out the home-exchange website again. It became a habit, like looking at property supplements when you’re not buying. One day, I signed up, thinking, ‘it’s only a hundred quid, no great loss if I never get to organise an actual exchange’. Once I’d signed up, though, people contacted me, almost immediately. For someone with problems planning ahead, suddenly, I had to. This was a good thing.

The first request that really caught my attention was from Sweden, somewhere I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. The home looked beautiful. It was in a place called Dalaro, on the Swedish archipelago, where many Swedes kick off their annual sailing holiday. The family had a daughter the same age as ours. Before I knew it, I’d booked flights. For months, I enjoyed the unique experience of looking forward to a holiday.

Staying in a family home was very relaxing. We came and went as we pleased. With extra spending money, we could eat out every night. If we felt like eating in, we could. The children had a trampoline, fussball, and a hammock to chill with.

One of the best things about the home exchange, though, was the unique access it gave to the Swedish way of life. Hotels don’t teach you much about the country you are visiting. In a home, you see how people live. The Swedish home was genuinely old but beautifully modernised with wooden floors and modern furniture. Everywhere you sat, there were little massagers to run over yourself. The bath was a jacuzzi. There was also a sauna. Locals repeatedly spoke of bleak dark winters. And it seemed to me that maybe pampering was a strategic way of surviving them.

The couple we were exchanging with were part of a group friends that got together once a month for a big meal that rotated from house to house. The month we visited, they invited us along. It was like a party for families. The kids hung out together. So did the adults. Everything was fluid, including the English. The food — a real taste of Sweden — was incredible and the company fascinating. Many of the couples were partnered with people from the US, UK, Denmark, Finland. One man spoke of hunting moose and packing the freezer with meat. We sang a bizarre range of songs, late into the night. It was the highlight of the trip and something that would not have happened if we’d stayed in a hotel.

Due to a lack of organisation, I failed to renew our home exchange membership and reverted to last-minute holiday booking the following year. We had a very pleasant, outrageously expensive hotel-based, one-week trip to Sardinia, the second week in August.

This year, I remembered to sign up with the home exchange company. With teenagers, we wanted an outdoorsy, action-packed holiday. I was hoping for Vancouver Island, somewhere I’d wanted to visit since I was 15. We arranged a swap with a retired couple of Irish decent.

Just before we left for Canada, I had a minor panic attack. Canadian cousins kept asking why we were staying in Nanaimo and not Victoria.

Too late, I Googled Nanaimo and began to wonder myself why I’d chosen to stay there. It seemed to be the least interesting part of the island.

Then I remembered — it was the photo of a deer in the back garden of the exchange couple that had swung it.

As a fall back, I booked four nights in a beach house in Tofino, on the west coast of the island. And two nights in Vancouver at the end of the trip.

As it happened, I needn’t have panicked. The exchange home was in a lovely community in Nanoose Bay, north of Nanaimo.

The house was perfect and surrounded by nature. A family of deer (complete with fawn twins) slept in the back garden every night. We saw humming birds, otters, rabbits, bald eagles, seals, and woodpeckers. My husband almost stood on a snake. A pod of orcas swam, leapt and blow-holed just off the coast. We went white water rafting. We hired bikes and rode through amazing scenery. We did obstacle courses, high up in the trees. And despite travelling at the worst summer month for sun (another organisational oversight), we were very lucky with the weather.

The beach house in Tofino was amazing. We rented surf boards and wetsuits and rode the waves, some of us less majestically than others.

Early one morning, a black bear ambled onto our beach right in front of the house. The last two nights in Vancouver gave us a flavour of city life in Canada. I loved Vancouver almost as much as New York.

The attraction of exchanging homes is clear — no accommodation costs, and if the family you are exchanging with has a car, no rental costs. It works simply. Sign up with a home exchange website (eg homelink.org, homeexchange.com). Upload photos and a description of your home. Pay an annual fee (with homelink, the fee is €100 if you include one photo, €120 if you include 20).

Members who wish to exchange with you, contact you through the site and visa versa. Matching up can take a while. So contacts should be made well before summer.

* Sign up in plenty of time and start contacting people immediately if you have a specific location in mind. Matches can take a while.

* Be friendly and helpful. Give as much information (including photos) as possible to help them make their decision.

* Do your research. Don’t make emotional decisions based on photos of deer! Google your location. Check out the best time to visit.

* Check that the family has a car, if you wish to use one.

* Avoid looking after your exchange family’s pets. On our exchange to Sweden, we agreed to mind the family’s two cats. We thought that cats looked after themselves. Just before we travelled, one of them got sick. We had to give him medication every day. He refused to take it. Then he disappeared for three days. I worried that he was dead and I was responsible. He reappeared on the third night with a mouse. I only noticed the mouse when I accidentally stepped on it. While we were away, our goldfish was overfed and died.

* Store any valuables with relatives. Just in case.

* Hire a cleaner for the day before you go. You don’t want to have to clean your home from top to bottom the day before you travel.

* It can be nice to exchange with families whose children are the same age, eg they should have the kind of entertainment your kids like.

* Inform the home exchange company if you have a bad experience. There are no reviews of families on the site. Feedback is encouraged so that standards can be kept high.