Have you ever heard of homeswapping? It is one of the best save money tips for travel that I know.
What if there was a way to locate a person or a family in whatever part of the world you are thinking about visiting, who would also like to visit your city for a holiday? You both have an asset that could help the other avoid the high price of hotels, which are probably the largest single expenditure of any vacation other than airfare. Until the advent of the Internet, it would’ve been very difficult to even establish contact with that person for a swap, but times have certainly changed.
The way it works is simple: join a homeswap website (there are many of them out there) then look for people with homes in parts of the world you’d like to visit. When you sign up you’ll also be able to specify destinations that you would like to visit yourself, so that potential swap partners can find you.
An attractive part of the process is looking at all possibilities in destinations and housing arrangements that suddenly become available to you with swapping. Maybe you didn’t ever seriously think about visiting the South of France for instance, or Bali, Indonesia. When you find a nice-looking apartment or house whose owner actually wants to come to your city for a holiday, you’ll enjoy suddenly considering the prospect of visiting this place, with no hotel expenses either!
Not only does home swapping save you money on accommodations: since you will probably have a kitchen at your disposal you can save lots of money by cooking for yourself, if you are inclined. Since you are living less like a tourist and more like a resident of the place you’re visiting, you can avoid paying “tourist retail” prices for everything, in favor of shopping in local markets and maybe interacting a little bit with people who live around your new temporary neighborhood. In this way, home swapping is about even more than saving money on travel, it’s about having a much more authentic experience on your vacation.
Normally it’s about $50/year to join a home swapping website. Obviously one swap would completely recoup this cost. Chances are that you’ll find yourself eventually taking a vacation in a part of the world and having an experience that you never could have had without home swapping, and it’s hard to put a value on that.
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