Do you wish you could go on holiday more with your family? See more of the world without the costly hotel bills? Well, it’s your lucky day as I have the answer. One of my favourite things to do as a family is to travel and have new experiences together. However, it can get pretty expensive keeping up with that travel bug. I was so intrigued when Home Exchange reached out to me to see if we wanted to experience a Home Exchange break.
Have you heard of Home Exchange?
I’m sure some of you will have, but for those of you who haven’t heard of Home Exchange you might want to check out a post I wrote prior to our visit. Home Exchange have over 65,000 listings, in over 150 countries, all combining to over 1,000,000 exchanges! The idea of Home Exchange is to connect like-minded travellers, helping them travel anywhere, live like locals, and stay for free.
After you join Home Exchange you have to complete your profile to begin receiving enquiries from interested exchangers. There’s the facility to upload photos, videos and lots of description about your home, so sing it’s praises! Here’s our house’s profile.
As you can see you can pop in your preferred dates and destinations or leave it open to attract more enquiries! When you’re all set up you get to move onto the fun part, looking at listings! I’ll be honest with you I’ve spent WAY too much of my life already scouring these listings. It is a little bit addictive. You can use lots of different search filters and narrow your browsing.
I really fancied Amsterdam, so I started searching and spoke to a few lovely people through the messaging inbox right on the site. Pretty quickly I found a great house and the owners were happy for us to stay during the time we needed to, perfect!
As I mentioned in my previous post, this time we weren’t doing a straight exchange, but instead we were redeeming a ‘balloon’ we were given in order to test the service. This balloon means we don’t have anyone staying in our house while we were away. We then pass this balloon onto our hosts in Amsterdam. They can then pass it onto someone in the future (staying somewhere without giving their home in return too).
Everything was fixed up over a couple of messages. Home Exchange provide a contract which you can agree to and save to make the exchange a sealed deal. Then you really are good to go. We agreed to pick the keys up from a neighbour and our hosts ‘Whatsapped’ to make sure we had arrived ok, which was lovely.
We stayed in a three story town house, which while still in the city, was 15 minutes from the centre by tram. Incidentally the tram goes from the end of the road, so it was really convenient.
Our hosts had left a house file, to ensure we had an easy time in the house and could work everything easily. Other people’s gadgets always seem trickier than our own, don’t they?! They had also left us some beer, cheese and waffles, such a lovely touch.
While we didn’t look in cupboards (apart from the kitchen), there were plenty of toys out for Ava to play with.
The kitchen had everything we could need, and with a couple of local shops and a Chinese takeaway close by we were all set.
I think Ava’s favourite part of the entire trip was the piano. She totally adored playing it and it actually turned out to be a great bargaining tool..
Oh and the fact that there was a playground right outside the front door!
We really enjoyed our Home Exchange experience, it was so easy and seamless. We can’t wait to start planning our next trip! Where would you go on a Home Exchange?
Disclosure: We were given a balloon and a year’s membership in return for our honest review of the service. All other expenses were our own.