We are pleased to introduce our guest blogger, Lois Sealy, who runs a home exchange agency, Home Base Holidays, based in Great Britain and serving the world. We met because of a recent Kango blog on home exchange. Lois offers valuable insights into home exchanges in her blog and fosters home exchanges around the world through her website. In this brief post, Lois explains how you can improve your home exchange experience by giving detailed information on your interests in your exchange offer. Samples of just two of the many homes available for exchange are included to illustrate the topic.

Most home exchangers are very good at including information in their home exchange offers on attractions and activities available where they live. This is really useful as it helps potential home swap partners decide if the location, as well as the home, is likely to suit their needs and interests. It is also helpful to include information on your own interests and those of other family members. This will help those interested in your offer to tailor their exchange offer messages to you around your interests, needs or special requests.

Two members, both living on the West coast North America, joined almost simultaneously a few days ago and, as it happens, both not only provide excellent descriptions of their areas’ attractions but also give details of their own interests and thus, good clues to what they might like to do while on a home exchange. The first family live on the outskirts of Victoria, British Columbia, and the second, a retired couple, live in Eugene, Oregon:

“We are a very active family of four looking forward to our first house exchange. Don is the General Sales Manager of two local radio stations. He enjoys cheering on his favorite hockey team – The Canucks, gardening and hiking! Megan is a Financial Planner. She keeps busy away from work enjoying her many artistic projects. Tye, our oldest son, is in 10th grade. He is a passionate musician who is very active in the local music scene. Cory, our 15 year old is in grade 9 and spends his spare time perfecting his passion…magic. He works at a local restaurant on weekends performing close up magic! Our family is made complete with our quirky dog, Milo. Milo will be staying at Grandma’s when you visit.”

See the family’s attractive home exchange offer in the beautiful city of Victoria, BC, Canada.

“We are very active seniors, recently retired. My husband was an electrical contractor and I was an accountant. We are respectful of other people’s property and would treat your home with care. We love animals and would not mind caring for your pets, if you need it. We like to fish, go on walks, visit other countries and learn of different cultures. Our 3 bdrm house, with a large deck w/barbecue and view of local hills is located in a wooded area (deer munch on our flowers), yet just 15 minutes from downtown Eugene.”

See the couple’s exchange offer in Eugene, Oregon, USA

Both these profiles illustrate my suggestion about providing sufficient information about your family, home and the surrounding area to help the potential swap partner make a decision. For more tips, please visit Home Base Holidays.

Do have a home exchange story to share? Share your tips, stories and ideas about your home exchange experiences and your travels with us, we love to hear where you are going!

Related Information:
Home Exchange Blog
Home Base Holidays

From guest blogger, Sarah Ellerman

Have a wish list of places you’d like to travel, but no idea how you’d ever make those dreams into reality? Look around you – really look – at the place where you live. Chances are, you’ve never thought about what a valuable vacation commodity your own home is.

Look at me: I rent a modest home in California, and while I’ve always adored it, I never dreamt that it would be the key to unlock affordable world travel for me. It started when a friend told me about her experience with a house swap vacation – known in various circles as home exchange, flat exchange, home swap, and so on. It’s all the same brilliant concept, though: like-minded travelers in different parts of the world hooking up to trade free vacation time in their house, apartment or RV. My little 2BR/1BA has made it possible for me to visit such places as Paris, Kauai and Hilton Head for little more than the cost of a plane ticket. Even better, I didn’t have to arrange for a housesitter for my houseplants and fish tank – my swap family looks after such details for me, just as I do for them. (This means that I have more responsibilities than at a hotel, but I consider that acceptable – even enjoyable.)

That’s because house swaps are undeniably economical. With lodging costs out of the equation, you’ll find that a trip to even the most exclusive locale is suddenly well within reach. Use of the family vehicle is often included in the deal, and with a kitchen on hand, you can cook local food. In no way is cost the only attraction, though. House swaps offer you the chance to live like locals, not tourists, so if you’re interested in an authentic experience, it’s the way to go.

Mutual respect is the most crucial aspect of any house swap. After all, you will be staying in each other’s homes! Many house swap vacationers report long-lasting ties with their swap family, leading to repeat vacations. If you are clean, responsible and thoughtful, you may find that within a few years, you’ll have special places to stay all over the globe.

The field of matching people up for house swaps is dominated by the free ads on Craigslist, but there are many other sites – some with a fee, some without. Home Exchange has glowing testimonials, and Only in America has listings and great advice. Homes in England is fab if you dream of visiting the UK, and for a look at exotic homes from Shanghai to Barcelona, check out Expatriates. There’s someone out there who would jump at the chance to stay in your so-called “ordinary” house – and perhaps you’d like to spend a week in their flat in London, or their rancher with a hot tub in Big Sur. Open your mind – and your front door – to the idea of house swap vacations, and anything is possible.

At home we take for granted recycling programs. It has become easy, part of our daily routine. And when we can’t do it on vacation, it almost makes us feel dirty and out-of-sorts. Its like when you live in a city (or state) that has banned indoor smoking and then travel to state that doesn’t ban indoor smoking. At least with smoking you don’t have to contribute to that gross smell and feeling. When your travel destination doesn’t recycle, it’s hard to avoid making garbage.

The sheer enormity of the problem is mind boggling. I visited my time share in Cabo San Lucas last year. Fortunately it has its own desalinization plant, so I wasn’t using up lots of bottled water. But I was using tons of glass bottles and aluminum cans for juice, a lots of paper in the form cardboard cereal boxes, local newspapers, flyers, advertisements, promotional brochures, etc.

Every time I threw something out (or pretended I wasn’t really throwing it out by leaving the item next to the trash can in the hopes that the recycle fairies would rescue it) I’d get that dirty feeling. I would mentally calculate the number of articles I threw out that day that I would have normally recycled, times the number of rooms at this large time share, times the number of days in the year, times the number of similar large hotels/time-shares in Cabo San Lucas (pictured). It was staggering.

From our experience in the US, we know it is tough to institute recycling programs. Tough but doable. It takes commitment and it takes a few large groups that are committed to providing enough volume of recyclable materials to make it worthwhile. In large resort towns, this means if the large resorts don’t recycle, then no one in the town or the whole area will recycle. But it also means that once a critical mass of resorts starts, it can and will spread. A local market for the recycling inputs, outputs and services can be formed and sustained. It means more local jobs. And it sends the message that those visiting tourists do care about the local environment.

So herewith is a suggestion. If you’d like your timeshare to institute a recycling program, let them know. If your timeshare has a recycling program, leave a comment here and share with others readers. Let’s work together and encourage recycling programs to protect the environment in those very places whose environments are so beautiful we want to visit them. And for more discussions on eco-friendly travel, visit Simple Green Choices.