Some young travelers are no longer choosing hotels when they go on vacation—they’re swapping homes with someone else. Spurred on by everything from romantic movies like The Holiday to the cost-of-living crisis, Generation Z and millennials are immersing themselves in a new culture by stepping into someone else’s home. The purse-friendly getaway traces its origins to the 1950s, when the United States was hit with a recession and the United Kingdom was still on rations.
Now, it’s giving a new generation of vacationers an inexpensive way to travel. New house-swapping clubs are springing up the U.S. and Europe in response to the revival. In 2020, Family Home Swaps launched in the U.K. for adventurous families who want a home away from home.
In 2021, Kindred was created in the United States, giving its 400,000 members the ability to trade homes, not cash. And three years later, Hemma began a similar project in Sweden. The more established house-swapping clubs have also seen a boost in numbers.
Love Home Swap, which started in 2011, saw its membership rise 82 percent in 2022. TikTok users are sharing tips on how to prepare your home for a house swap, people are advertising their homes for swapping, and the British TV actor Jules Knight hit the headlines when he asked his fans if they would like to do a house swap over Christmas. Unlike hotels, house swapping enables people to make connections with their fellow hosts and immerse themselves more quickly into the community as they live like locals in their chosen home.
In 1953, young New York teacher David Ostroff typed up a list of colleagues who would be happy to exchange their homes during the holidays. In the same year, a group of European teachers created the house-swapping group Intervac International in the hope of traveling abroad during their vacations. In order for Ostroff to find fellow swappers and subscribers for his house-swapping mailing list, he printed 15,000 posters, which he sent to schools across the country to pin on their bulletin boards.
However, as his first subscription drive only attracted 100 subscribers, he started advertising in teacher journals. By the 1960s, the “list,” which he mailed to subscribers, had turned into the Vacation Exchange Club (now HomeLink) offering house swaps in the U.S. and Europe. Other companies such as Home Base Holidays, which was established in 1985 in London, followed suit, sending catalogs of listings to house swappers, who would studiously pore over them before sending a letter or calling the homeowners to book their week in the sun.
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