How the cost of living crisis made home swapping trendier than ever

“We switch houses, cars – everything. I haven’t done it but friends of mine have.”

So starts a beautiful friendship in 2006 festive classic The Holiday. In the film, a chaotic Hollywood type (Cameron Diaz) swaps houses and lives for two weeks with a lovelorn Surrey cottage owner (Kate Winslet).

Ever since Diaz and Winslet exchanged front door keys and hometowns, the concept of home swapping has been steadily growing – and, with living costs sharply rising in the UK, it’s set to become even more vital for Britons seeking affordable travel options.

Love Home Swap, which launched in 2011 after the success of The Holiday, charges an annual membership (from £96) to access its listings, for which users “can enjoy an unlimited number of home swap holidays for less than the cost of one night in many hotel rooms in the UK’s capital cities”.

The company predicts that home swappers save an average of £2,000 per week on accommodation alone; they could save even more when you “add in the fact that swappers generally also have access to a full kitchen, plus they can often borrow additional extras such as bikes,” says a spokesperson. The catch, of course, is that you need your own home in order to join the website and take advantage of swaps.

Browsing Love Home Swap, it’s far from just city flats and suburban homes: in one quick search I find period townhouses in New Orleans’ glorious French Quarter, a solar-powered grand design of a hideaway in Hiroshima, Japan, and a thatched poolside chalet hidden in the mountains of Sri Lanka. Other platforms include HomeExchange, Switchome and Holiday Swap.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to swap: mutual exchange (what The Holiday ladies did), where you stay at each other’s homes simultaneously; and swapping for points, where someone from the community stays at your place while you’re already away, and you accrue points to “spend” at another house swap property in future.

But home switching as a budget travel hack is becoming ever more visible in belt-tightened 2022, especially with families. Consumer travel expert Rory Boland recently raved on Twitter about “paying zero pounds” to stay in a huge, detached family home in Australia for a month this summer, while its occupants stayed in his family’s east London home.

“As with a lot of people, holidays to some places were becoming too expensive for us,” he tells The Independent. “That’s partly because 10 years of a sluggish UK economy made other countries more expensive and partly because we have two freeloading kids to pay for. House swapping lets us cut out the main cost of the holiday almost completely. You are reducing the price of your trip by 60-70 per cent.”

He points out that families are often tied in to peak-price school holidays when it comes to travels, so the saving is more important than ever. “There are a lot of families on the house swap sites, which means they are often looking for exchanges during school holidays,” he says. “That’s a huge plus, as hotel and private rental prices are usually much higher during those periods.”

Rory did the price comparison maths when he visited the Irish seaside town of Enniscrone this summer. “The cheapest accommodation I could find to rent at the time cost more than €1,000 (£863). But my 10-day house swap was free, save the £100 joining fee for the platform,” he says.

“I have been on three trips total [on that fee], including a month in Australia, so I have saved several thousand pounds. I would not have been able to afford to go to Australia without a house exchange.”

James Asquith, founder of Holiday Swap, estimates that a place to stay accounts for at least a third of overall holiday cost. He told Euronews: “The days where you could stick an all-inclusive hotel holiday on a credit card and work overtime to pay it off are gone for a while. If you minimise the biggest cost of travel, which is accommodation at 36 per cent, it can be a huge saving.”

On top of the saving, Rory sees it as a more ethical alternative to Airbnb and similar rental platforms. “These are contributing to the house price crisis and overtourism in some places, and the platforms have lost some of the enjoyable social interaction you used to get when staying at someone’s home,” he says.

Marketing professional Samantha Kirton, who is currently hosting Love Home Swap guests in her Fistral Beach house in Cornwall, agrees. “Airbnb is a mixed blessing in Cornwall,” she says. “Over the last 12 months we’ve seen a lot of people in rented accommodation displaced as landlords switched from long-lets to quick bucks.

“For us, the home swap route feels like a more sustainable option and that we’re buying into a community of like-minded people, where you get to go and try out their lifestyle for a short while.”

Having guests means she can rack up points on Love Home Swap to spend at a later date – in the meantime, she and her partner have set off in their campervan.

It’s not just budget travellers taking advantage. At the luxury end of the market is THIRDHOME – where people with “spare” holiday homes stay in each other’s vacant properties in exchange for points, which they can in turn spend on stays in other holiday homes. The site’s team says it has seen an increase of 78 per cent to its sign-ups this year, showing interest in joining the community, compared to the same period in 2021. Over the past five years THIRDHOME’s membership has grown by 16 per cent on average, year on year.

You can house swap anywhere in the world, but it’s an especially good value prospect in the sometimes pricey UK. With central London pads that would cost upwards of £300 a night on a rental’s website able to be snapped up by country mice in exchange for the handover of your keys for a few nights, along with luxury Devon pads sleeping eight and seaside pieds-à-terre, the potential savings are huge.

On THIRDHOME, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Switzerland and the UK have seen the most growth, with 50 per cent more bookings this year than last. Giles Adams, the site’s strategy and operations director, says the mutual swap is what makes the holiday more enjoyable than a traditional rental apartment.

“Members are both hosts and guests as opposed to owners and renters and this makes the experience much richer for both parties,” he explains. “Hosts wanting to present their homes in the best possible light and guests taking extra care of other members’ homes as they understand that it is a privilege to be able to stay in a property in this way.”

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“The fun element of exchanging comes through the personal interactions members have with each other. Hosts are generally very keen to recommend the best restaurants to go to or excursions/activities to enjoy.”

Rory agrees. “You really get to know guests and hosts, which in turn helps you get to know the place you are travelling to. I’m still exchanging messages with a couple who stayed at our house long after they left – sending them pictures of our dog, who they kindly looked after.” (Oh, did we mention you could get dogsitting thrown in for free, too?)

Having tried a few platforms, he recommends HomeExchange, which has 65,000 properties listed worldwide. “I find it easy to use and it has a large, active community with easy to read reviews. It is also a B-corp [rated as having a positive impact on society and environment]. That is important to me.”

A similar trend also gaining traction is housesitting – essentially, a free rental for anyone who’s willing to look after your home, pet and plants. On Trusted Housesitters, you also pay a membership fee and join a community, bagging free accommodation in exchange for some dog walks or cat feeding while you’re there. (It’s worth bearing in mind that some countries regard housesitting as work, for visa purposes, so this can be a more complicated option.)

For Samantha Kirton, using a platform with a points system means free stays with much more flexibility than finding someone with the exact same holiday dates as you. As well as making use of her weekends campervanning to get some guests in and earn points, she tells me they can fit guests around regular travel plans. “We’ve already got someone booked in for Christmas and New Year, which is when we’re usually away anyway visiting family.”

As for the £96 membership cost? If you average that out to three “free” stays somewhere per year, you’ve spent £32 per stay on accommodation – as well as tapping a potential goldmine of local tips, kitchen and laundry equipment, bicycles and garden patio. And potentially even a temporary puppy to walk.