Home Exchange

This article is a review of the house swapping website called HomeExchange. They are the largest home exchange network online, with hundreds of thousands of properties listed all over the world. We are writing solely based on OUR experience using them.

HomeExchange offers two different payment plans. You can sign up for free, and then choose a membership plan when you’re ready to book an exchange. You can either pay a low fee per-night, or an annual membership that allows for unlimited exchanges. If you sign up for an annual membership and do not complete an exchange during your first year, your second year is free! We started off with an annual membership, and recently renewed at no cost because we didn’t complete any exchanges during our first year.

When we signed up for HomeExchange, we listed our property in Niagara Falls, Ontario. We recently added our Vancouver property, and have been receiving a lot of interest for both simultaneous and non-simultaneous exchanges. HomeExchange has a ‘GuestPoints’ program, where you can earn points when you host and spend them when you stay as a guest. This offers a great, flexible option for travellers!

Our Experience

This past week we did our first swap through HomeExchange. We headed down to Portland, Oregon (one of our favourite US cities) for a 3 night visit! The hosts we connected with offered us a beautiful coach house in a great neighbourhood in East Portland. The suite was entirely private, had a full kitchen, a work space, a comfortable bedroom, and everything we needed for a short stay. We agreed on a non-simultaneous exchange, and we will be hosting the owners in our Vancouver property early next year. They were absolutely lovely people to deal with, and it reminded us why we love the community nature of house swaps. We had such an excellent experience during our first swap using HomeExchange!

Here are all of the things we loved:

-users on the website are active and respond quickly

-booking an exchange was easy and stress free

-there were plenty of properties to choose from in our desired location

Of course, because things went so smoothly during our exchange, we aren’t able to fully review the HomeExchange website’s customer service. We didn’t need to contact a customer service representative for any reason, because nothing went wrong! We have had bad experiences with another home swapping website, so we did look into all of HomeExchange’s policies before booking our exchange.

They state the following policies to their users:

-HomeExchange will handle the mediation between the host and the guest in case of incident or damage

-HomeExchange will compensate you in case of any unforeseen incident or damages as a host or guest

-Customer service is available by email or telephone Monday-Friday from 10am-6pm

-There is a live chat platform where ambassador members can answer questions

-In case of emergency, personalized assistance is available by email and phone 24/7

We are confident that the HomeExchange customer service team is far superior to that of smaller home swapping websites. They appear to have systems in place for dealing with problem guests, incidents, and emergencies, and their platform also has a great review system. We feel good knowing that we would be protected as hosts in the case of a bad experience, and that the website would work to mediate and compensate us (unlike Love Home Swap).

We absolutely recommend HomeExchange as an excellent house swapping website. From what we have experienced, they are the best option out there! Being the largest network, they have far more properties available to choose from compared to other websites. They also have excellent policies in place, and a dedicated customer service team in case problems arise. Click here to join the community!

Have you ever tried a home exchange? Let us know how you liked it in the comments below!

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this blog post may be affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we could make a small commission through your purchase. We only recommend products and services that we truly believe in, and the income generated goes toward creating more content on this website for you to enjoy for free.

The post Our Review of HomeExchange.com    appeared first on Lez See the World.

Love Home Swap

This article is a review of the home exchange website called Love Home Swap. Founded in 2009, Love Home Swap is one of the bigger home sharing websites out there. We are writing solely based on OUR experience using them.

Love Home Swap offers a free 14 day trial membership, as well as 3 tiers of paid memberships. The paid memberships offer different benefits, and the monthly fees are billed annually. We started off with a 14 day trial and then started a paid platinum membership.

When we signed up for Love Home Swap, we listed our property in Niagara Falls, Ontario. We immediately had quite a bit of interest for non-simultaneous exchanges, also known as “points swaps”. This is offered as a more flexible option, meaning that you earn points when someone comes to stay in your home, and you can use the points on a future trip. In theory, we could host guests at our house in Niagara Falls, earn points, and then use those points to book a stay at a destination of our choice.

Our Experience

We accepted our first exchange, and hosted guests over a 5 day period during the summertime. We offered them a stay in our main house, while we had Airbnb guests downstairs during the duration of the exchange. We expected respectful guests, since in the past we have found home exchangers to be great people! If someone is trusting others with their home, they tend to be very respectful of someone else’s space. It’s one of the reasons why we love the community nature of home exchanges. Unfortunately, we had a terrible experience with our first Love Home Swap home exchangers.

Here is what we had to deal with:

-noise complaints from our Airbnb guests (who we ended up refunding for the inconvenience)

-the biggest mess we have ever had guests leave (we needed to pay our cleaner extra)

-minor damage to our home and items that needed replacing

-numerous house rules that were broken including additional un-authorized guests and pets

-all of our doors left unlocked when the guests departed

While this AWFUL experience came as a surprise, we do understand that a certain level of risk comes along with allowing people into your home. However, we have been Airbnb hosts and home exchangers for many years, and have never experienced such an unfortunate situation. Our only source of comfort, was the assumption that the Love Home Swap customer service representatives would help us to rectify the situation.

Unfortunately, upon contacting the website with our concerns we were told that:

-they have no policy for problem guests

-they have no resolution centre to help rectify issues

-they want to believe that this was an “isolated incident”

-they do not allow home exchange hosts to review guests

-this guest would continue to be able to book home exchanges without other hosts knowing about the incident

-we could not receive any compensation for the trouble/damages unless we requested it from the guest directly

The Love Home Swap customer service representative encouraged us to “keep communication open” with the guest, and told us that they would be willing to help mediate “if they were being unresponsive”. They offered to make a note on their account for monitoring purposes, but indicated no consequences for the guest whatsoever. We were extremely disappointed with the way the situation was handled, and shocked that Love Home Swap didn’t have any policies in place for issues such as this.

Other Things to Note

Naturally, we chose to cancel our membership after this happened and try a different home exchange website with better policies! Aside from our terrible experience with the problem guest, we also had some other issues with Love Home Swap that we wanted to mention:

-the benefits offered through the platinum membership were difficult to access, and were only received after emailing Love Home Swap to inquire about them

-many users were inactive and wouldn’t respond to inquiries, making it difficult to book exchanges or use the points we accumulated

-memberships cannot be cancelled immediately by the user, and cancellations can only be requested by emailing or calling Love Home Swap

-Love Home Swap will not cancel a membership immediately and instead will attempt to keep you in the program (we had to sternly ask 3 times before they agreed to cancel our membership)

In short, we do NOT recommend Love Home Swap as a home exchange website. There are better options out there! We have been much happier with our experience so far on HomeExchange.com It’s the largest home exchange network online, and there are hundreds of thousands of properties listed all over the world. We are doing our first exchange this week, so stay tuned for our review!

Have you ever tried a home exchange? Let us know your experience in the comments below!

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this blog post may be affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we could make a small commission through your purchase. We only recommend products and services that we truly believe in, and the income generated goes toward creating more content on this website for you to enjoy for free.

The post Our Review of Love Home Swap   appeared first on Lez See the World.