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.

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