Photo by Evelyn Paris | Unsplash

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When you travel, wouldn’t it be great to skip the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a hotel costs and instead stay in a home, where you can entertain friends, maybe even cook a meal or bake a cake?

That dream exists, and not just with Airbnb: It’s called home-trading.

My wife and I have been doing home trades for almost 20 years and have completed nearly 50. We’ve stayed on Cape Cod, in charming neighborhoods in Seattle, San Diego and San Francisco, and in a condo on the French Riviera. Along the way, we’ve met wonderful, like-minded couples — and sometimes their neighbors, since home-trading situates you in a community, not a commercial strip.

In at least one case, my wife and I became good friends with a trade partner, a couple with a condo in Manhattan. The fact that we’ve swapped our smallish Columbia home four times with them proves that you need not own an urban penthouse or Aspen A-frame to trade. In our case, having a pool did help, since the Manhattanites have three grandchildren in Ellicott City.

For all the benefits of home-sharing, though, our friends have sometimes expressed skepticism, worrying about theft or that they’d encounter a dirty place.

On the contrary, we feel our house is actually safer when occupied while we’re away. We know our guests value their reputation for honesty as much as we do. We don’t leave cash lying around, of course, but neither do we hide our cameras or computers. As for cleanliness, we leave our homes sparkling and always find our hosts have done the same.

Some downsides

That’s not to say home-trading is without challenges. For one, the typical stay is a week, so it’s not a good option for a quick road trip. (However, we recently hosted an Italian family who made our house the last stop on their road trip.)

Another limitation is that, unlike hotel reservations, you must plan trades months in advance and, once set, they’re hard to cancel. Once, however, we let a Montreal couple bail on the trade we’d planned with them months before. (An anti-Canadian president had been elected in the States, and they didn’t want to travel here.)

To be a home-trader, one needs to join an online organization. We’re longtime members of homeexchange.com, which claims to be the largest service, with more than 600,000 properties worldwide. Other services are homelink.org and livekindred.com.

Members of Home Exchange pay $235 annually and get 500 “guest points” when joining, plus insurance against theft or damage during a guest’s stay.

Each of these services offers a catalog of properties with pictures and descriptions of each, alongside each owners’ number of trades and their starred ratings from other guests.

One can join a home-trading service and then wait to hear a request to swap, but it’s better to be proactive if you want a trade in a specific locale. This means searching listings, finding homes or apartments in the location where you’re headed, and emailing the owners suggesting a trade.

These emails should extol the perks of your home and the events in your area at the time when you’d like to swap. We’ve regularly pointed to area happenings in Washington, D.C., such as the Cherry Blossom Festival.

While home-trading was once limited to strictly simultaneous swaps, Home Exchange’s “guest points” concept is popular with vacation-home owners. They can set a rate for their property in points and accumulate points through trades, just as if they were gaining cash. They can then “spend” the points later; for instance, using points gained from a summer home to stay at a winter resort.

That’s if they can find a resort to take points during its “high season,” when cash is king. We’ve accumulated points with summertime trades of our home (we were out of town anyway) but found few takers when shopping for winter stays in Cancun.

Hosting tips

After joining a service like homeexchange.com, hopeful traders create a listing and write a “home manual” to apprise guests of essentials like their Wi-Fi password, how the TV operates, and what visitors can and cannot do.

For instance, you might welcome them to eat whatever’s in the fridge but not the freezer, and also ask if they could pick up the mail or water the plants.

Some swappers even ask for pet-sitting. Once, we swapped with a Pittsburgh woman who needed coverage for two cats and didn’t even want to stay in our house while we were away. We were delighted — until one kitty escaped and had us combing the neighborhood for hours. (We found her.)

Often, swappers will place the instruction manual in, say, a gift basket with a bottle of wine or some chocolates, anything to greet guests on arrival.

Lastly, it’s good to get a realtor-type lockbox to hold your house key. Just hang it on your doorknob and then head off for a wonderful stay in someone else’s much-loved home.