We tried home exchange and loved it!
Vicki Jacks and her husband first tried a home exchange a few years ago and they haven’t looked back! Here, Vicki shares the secret to making a home exchange program work for retirees looking to travel the world.
Well before I retired I came across an article about home exchange while sitting in the waiting room for a routine mammogram. I was immediately taken with the idea, so I ripped it out and took it home to show my husband.
Fast-forward a few years and by this time we’d both retired and relocated from Perth to Melbourne. We decided that our motto would be to travel and do as much as we could while we were fairly young and able. We’d both worked all our adult lives and now was the time to have some adventures.
Realistically we didn’t have the money to travel to far-flung places and so the home exchange idea was revisited.
We briefly researched various websites and decided on one that seemed like it had been going for many years and had large numbers of listings in various parts of the world. We paid our subscription for a year, entered photos and a full description of our home and our area and sat back to see what would happen. We didn’t have to wait long!
Very soon we began to get offers for exchanges and plans began to evolve. Our first exchange was to a lovely little terrace house in Edinburgh for the month of December. All our (adult) kids were elsewhere that Christmas so it was a perfect chance to try something different and the exchange person was happy for my sister and brother in law from Western Australia to join us.
It was great fun to experience Edinburgh at Christmas and especially New Year, to explore all the museums and galleries, to drive out to nearby places (a car was included in the exchange) and to be able to head home to our warm and cosy house each night.
Our ‘London home’.
Since then we’ve spent two wonderful weeks in Ballinskelligs on the Ring of Kerry (again our exchanges were happy for friends to join us) where we explored this magical part of Ireland, did a fair amount of walking and spent many hours at the local music festival and of course, the pubs. Following this we had three weeks in a lovely home in Essex where we explored the fascinating muddy, “smuggler” coastline, quaint villages, historical Colchester and Chelmsford and we were able to easily commute from the local train station into London for shows and concerts.
The following year, we returned to “our” Edinburgh house for two incredible weeks of the Edinburgh Festival when we attended four performances a day every day! This was truly a bucket list item!
We’ve spent two glorious late autumn weeks in Noosa. While our friends and family in Melbourne were rugging up, we were swimming every day and enjoying our four-bedroom home with pool. This exchange also welcomed us having friends come to stay and a car to explore further afield.
In 2017 we completed four exchanges – a three week exchange to a four bedroom, three bathroom home in London (we never did get to the end of our “Museums and galleries list”), a 2.5 week exchange to a great funky 19th floor apartment in the middle of Berlin, a week in a large ranch style home in Phoenix, Arizona and a two week stay in a lovely eclectic home in wonderful Boulder, Colorado where were able to use the exchangees car to explore the surrounding mountains and where we woke up one morning to find it had snowed.
One aspect of our home exchange site is “hospitality exchange” and we’ve tried that in Galloway, Scotland. Our hosts are now our good friends and we catch up with them every year when they come to Melbourne to visit family.
There are some ‘cons’ to this type of travel. You have to like organizing! Organising the actual exchange takes time – sending requests, answering emails promptly, researching if this is actually somewhere you want to visit and so on. Once you have the exchange you have to be prepared to organize your own holiday, this would not suit everyone. We research the area in advance quite a bit to find guided walking tours and search out museums, galleries and concerts. We’ve booked tickets (Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, West End Theatre etc) well in advance but we’ve also had great luck with ‘last minute” tickets as we’re not restricted to one particular night.
Sampling some of Berlin’s local delicacies.
We agree to simultaneous and non-simultaneous exchanges and this works well in our favour as we can be flexible. We’ve found that most offers from the UK and Europe are for our summer and we don’t want to experience too many winters, so the flexibility works well. We’ve found it challenging to arrange USA and Canadian exchanges as Australia seems so far away to many people, even if they have listed “anywhere, anytime”!
We have not experienced any negative aspects at all in the 5 or so years we have been involved in home exchanges. We have always returned to a perfectly cleaned and wonderfully tidy home. Our next trips are to Washington DC, a village between Bath and Bristol and Kilkenny in Ireland.
When you’re only paying the airfare and no hotel costs – what’s not to like?
Have you tried home exchange? What was your experience like? Do you have any tips to share? Let us know in the comments below.
Image credits: Vicki Jacks