Kristen Jones can rattle off reasons she's itching to house-swap. “Staying three days in Paris in a hotel just isn't going to cut it,” says the 39-year-old Los Angeleno, a veteran world traveller who takes her growing family on at least one international vacation a year.
Of course, there's the economic upside to simply trading her house for someone else's for the length of a vacation. There's also the use of a kitchen once she gets there, the ingredients bought from local supermarkets, and the immersion she gets in local culture.
Then there's the fact that she's travelling with four young boys. “Hotels are so awful for kids. You're always telling them to be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, and there's never enough space,” she says. And, with her and her husband unable — or at least unwilling — to leave their kids alone in the room, “the evening thing is tricky.”
Jones, as it happens, is one of the first members of a new on-line house-swapping service called Geenee.com, a slick site that's hoping to bring mainstream travellers to what has historically been a folksy niche market.
For $85 to $220 a year in membership fees, Geenee brings the latest on-line sensibilities to the task of matching up two homeowners for a house exchange. These features range from star ratings and user reviews to on-line maps and a design (rounded corners, big fonts, bright colours) that screams 2006. It puts an encouraging, professional face on a proposition — letting strangers vacation in your house — that novices might find a bit daunting.
“There is this first step into doing a home exchange that needs to be facilitated,” says Allan Rienecker, Geenee's founder. “There's a lot of potential home-exchange people down there, and they just need to get on the ladder. And once they start, I can guarantee you'll have got them for life.”
Indeed, house-swappers have a habit of speaking with the zeal of the converted. Rienecker talks enthusiastically about the possibilities that home exchanges open up: the ability to engage with a destination in a way that hit-and-run tourism doesn't allow. “You live like a local. You really immerse yourself in local culture.”
Having become an Internet entrepreneur shortly after making a house swap to Sydney in his native Australia, Rienecker is pitting himself against bigger, older competitors with less-polished on-line presences, but whose membership rolls include tens of thousands of people.
The two largest house-swapping networks — HomeLink and InterVac — started off more than 50 years ago as services for teachers looking to spend summer vacations abroad. They eventually grew into loose international associations of home-exchangers, shipping catalogues of available houses to their members.
It was the kind of business the Internet was made for. Today, on-line databases give members an up-to-date catalogue to search, and instant contact with prospective partners. HomeLink and InterVac set up shop on-line in the late 1990s (both continue to offer hard-copy catalogues at extra cost), and a clutch of Web-only house-exchange services have sprung up since, including Homeexchange.com and Digsville.com.
“The number of agencies that have arisen is a pretty graphic testimony” to a growing acceptance of house-swapping, says Jack Graber, the Vancouverite who heads the Canadian arm of HomeLink International. HomeLink has about 1,100 members in Canada, and more than 14,000 worldwide.
In fact, given its inherent uncertainties, Graber says house-swapping is surprisingly trouble-free. “If I had discovered shortly after I opened that the people could not be trusted in terms of the way they looked after each other's places, or the way they presented their own home, I probably would have quit,” he says. “Probably the whole service would have collapsed.”
