Three days left to Christmas and a few more to the New Year. We are all hoping that the New Year may bring good news, happiness, maybe new or better relationships, work and money. That the crisis may be over soon and the unemployed people may find a job or have back their previous one. May the economy bear fruit.

This is also our –of HomeForhome blog- wish for Christmas.

And, as a promise for the New Year, we commit ourselves to doing our best, so that you can plan the best possible house swap. We’ll help you choosing between the many houses, giving you suggestions and tips, telling you new stories and curiosities. We will help describing your house appropriately, selecting photos, communicating with other users through our community, so that you can organise and get the perfect home exchange.

We will keep on suggesting new cities and destinations every week for your home exchanges.

We will highlight for you interesting and useful experiences and all the home swap advantages.

House swapping is a unique opportunity to travel comfortably and saving a lot of money (in accommodation, food, car rental…) and to know a city, a village or an area and its culture from a different point of view, a more ‘original’ one (in the double meaning of ‘related to the origins’ and ‘unusual’).

*** We wish you a wonderful home exchange and a happy New Year! ***

If what we wrote yesterday hasn’t been enough, we’d just like to remind of the fact that house swapping is…

1. The cheapest way of travelling since you don’t have to pay anything for your accommodation, you can eat at home and often you can arrange a car exchange too (so you don’t have to hire one).
2. Liberating: you can escape the hotel time and space restrictions, you can cook and eat whenever and with whoever you like, wake up late without losing your breakfast chance and leave the flat at the best time for you on your last day.

So, in the end, home swapping is the most comfortable way of being on holidays: you are on holidays but you’re at home at the same time!

After collecting here and there some ideas from swappers’ comments I am going to give you 9 adjectives (and their reasons) to describe a home exchange…

Home exchange is:

1. Fascinating: especially when you find out new cultures, a different life style, new habits…
2. Exciting: when you find out new cultures, a different life style, new habits and especially different types of…toilet papers
3. Interesting: when you get to know new books, new CDs and artists thanks to your swappers’ library.
4. Innovative: if you’ve never been on a home exchange then it will surely be innovative. It is a different way of planning and living your journey and your entire holidays.
5. Special: home sweet home…Much more special than an anonymous hotel room.
6. Different: see point number 4 and 5, they will make 6.
7. Convenient: it’s much cheaper than other ways of travelling since you don’t have to pay for your accommodation.
8. Exhilerating: you know what you leave but you don’t know exactly what you get…it could be a marvellous villa on the beach or a little flat in the centre of a big town, or a simple house in the mountains…
9. Daring: despite the fact that you can’t plan every details you get a special thrill in doing a home exchange

Isn’t it enough to home swap?

During this difficult time it seems that we all have to pay attention to how much we spend, what for and maybe we’d better forget about holidays too.

But to help you out I’d like to suggest another way of going on holidays without being ‘crippled by the crisis weight’.

Have you ever heard about house sitting?

“I have decided to be a house sitter. I have found that there are many folk who wish to leave their home and pets for periods whilst they travel, and they seek people like me to care for their house, their garden and their animals. For me it provides a place of peace, and plenty of time to write” . (Source: Diary of a House Sitter, http://housesitdiary.blogspot.com).

Yes, you understood correctly: also houses need to be taken care of, like dogs, plants, babies…

Many well-to-do families with equally comfortable houses often leave their house to some concierges. Now it seems quite trendy the habit of leaving the house (garden and animals included) to a person who will take care of it -precisely the house sitter- in return for a “change of place and air” or the possibility of living in a different, beautiful, maybe bigger, maybe luxury house or, whatever, to be able to go on even short holidays in another place, different from one’s own house. You can also earn some money in some cases.

However, apart from the house sitting news, if this is not your solution because you are a family or a couple –and this can be a more suitable solution for singles- you can always re-consider the home exchange option and start now to plan your economic, easy and comfortable house swap holidays!

This is a curious story about a three homes exchange, sent to me by Sandra.

Three flats, three cities, three persons involved in the exchange, three different jobs.

Sandra from Milan had to move to Barcelona for 3 months for a project related to thr fashion world. Stefan, from Berlin, had to go to Milan to set up an exhibition for a friend who won a pictorial competition. Laia, Spanish property developer, had to go to Berlin for the big estate agency she worked for in order to study the Berlin real estate market and to start up some business.
By chance, they all were looking for a flat during the same period.
Sandra has been quite enterprising and open-minded. She searched, amongst all the home exchange portal users, the ones who lived in Barcelona: she contacted everyone explaining her needs. Between these users, a girl from Barcelona suggested to Sandra to contact Stefan, a friend from Berlin who needed to go to Milan for work during the same months. The implicit idea was of creating a home exchange in a chain, that is implying three different persons with interrelated needs:

If Stefan had stayed at Sandra’s he could have given his house to someone from Barcelona who needed to stay in Berlin over the same period. This way Sandra could find a place in Barcelona for herself.
They wrote a post in the community and after a couple of days they found Laia, a catalan girl who luckily complete the home exchange triangle. She had excatly to move to Berlin for three months!
Thanks to initiative and luck “les jeux sont faits”! It surely hasn’t been the easiest and quickest way, but a little effort and time to search are necessary for every home exchange, even more if the exchange implies 3 houses and not 2, as it usually happens.
Well, to cut it short…In the end Sandra, Stefan and Laia could home swap under the sign of respect, trust, (occupational) necessity and money-saving.
They changed nation in order to work during some time abroad and they moved to a new, fully furnished, real house, full of books and CDs and without paying a penny for the rent! Furthermore, they had someone who took care of their own house while they were away.

They are happily back now, in their original houses and the three of them have already planned to meet: this time for a real home exchange vacation, not for work!

With some initiative, the will to do it and a little organisation ability, the house swap is not only a means to go cheaply on holidays, but also a good way to arrange short or longer working trips.

The non house swapping expert person may ask how the profiles of the people who home swap are… Well, simply and quickly we could say that they are normal, ordinarily special people. They can be housewives, professors, teachers, merchants, secretaries, psychologists, doctors, lorry drivers…

The home exchange is meant for giving a chance to everybody to know, in an affordable way, the world, its cultures, its people, its wonderful places. So everyone can join the game.

To give an example we’ll paste here the description of a user who sent us some questions before joining. As you can see, she’s a normal person, with a job, a family, a life…And the passion for travellin

We hope to see you soon joining our web site: www.homeforhome.com.

To obtain a good home exchange we can’t deny that the quality and the type of the photos we take is important.

We are not talking about taking professional pictures, rather we are talking about being able to choose the house aspects  we are going to show with the correct slant, light and the right touch that will make our house somehow attractive, even though in its simplicity or smallness.

Our house has to be shown as a whole: we are not suggesting of hiding the ugliest parts. As we already stated in a previous post, telling the truth is essential in a house swap. What we’d like to suggest here is of using your creativity and artistic ability to take some nice, “emotive” photos. Think of taking pictures that can talk about your house and may give it a warm touch of “livability” and comfort (which, in the end, is what matters most in a house).

Our older readers may ask themselves if this house-swapping-thing is something meant ONLY for young people.
The answer is: absolutely no.

First of all, because in order to plan a home exchange you need to be owning/renting a house and, nowadays, youngsters often depend on their family till quite late.
Second, it happens quite often that people of a certain age, maybe already retired, have much more time for themselves or to dedicate to holidays than other people who are still studying or fully working.
The advantage and the specialness offered by home exchange though, remain the same: a consistent saving of money in the accommodation cost and the possibility to know new cities, places and local people from a privileged, comfortable point of view.

In fact, since when it was born in the 50s, the house swap has been enjoyed by middle aged people who, getting older, have kept on exchanging houses, just because they found it a good way of travelling at an adequate economic investment.

In the end then, house swapping is good for everyone:

• Students who have a rented flat or room;
• Professionals or workers that want to travel in a different way and save some money;
• Curious people who want to go around and see the world from the “native” point of view, the one that only a real home can give you;
• Retired people or a little older persons who still feel like finding out the wonders of the world and its inhabitants: these people can set up a home exchange with others similar for age, life style and that have a type of house appropriate to their needs.

This week we suggest Padova as a city worth seeing and a good one for a home exchange.

Not far from Venice, Padova has its own value and beauty. Full of cheerful students during the academic year (Padova Universities have more than 60.000 students at the moment) and calmer during the hot summer, Padova is full of things to do, to see and to live, as you can see in a post by a traveller’s blog.

The beautiful squares (Piazza delle Erbe e Piazza della Frutta) in the city centre, give access to the Palazzo della Ragione. Here, you can try a typical drink called “spritz”. If you go on a normal day during the year, you can see hundreds of students and young people having their ritual spritz, chatting, singing, having fun, after a day of lessons at university.

But you can also find more serious stuff as the Cappella degli Scrovegni (with Giotto’s fresco paintings),the Duomo and the famous huge square “Prato della Valle”.

What else? Well, discover it by yourself! Why not planning a home exchange with a “padovano” (a citizen from Padova)? It’s worth giving it a try!

And any people-from-Padova  comments that may tempt  to pay a visit there are welcome!

Cheers.

Do you know how much a honeymoon costs?

If you googlesearch ‘honeymoon, prices’ one of the results  is the following:

From 1950 pounds??? It’s a lot of money! And especially in this difficult time. If we want to get married then we’ll have to plan our wedding, the banquet, the wedding dress…And even though it’s worth doing it –since it’s OUR special day- if we can save some money for the journey without giving up our honeymoon…Why not?

There aren’t so many couples yet, but already there are some, who swapped houses, right for their honeymoon. They all say they had a great time, fun and relax. Furthermore they enjoyed the experience and its…cheapness!And obviously all the advantages of house swapping.