If you’re going abroad for more than a few weeks, it might be worth buying a foreign sim card and putting it into your hand-set. It all depends on what sort of vacation you’re planning on taking, and how much you think you’ll be contacting people both within that country and abroad.

If you do a home exchange within Europe then it may be a good idea to look at your cell tariff to see how much the difference will be. If you are doing an extended home exchange then it is definitely a way that could save you money on your phone use.

In order to find out what the best tariffs, you can do an internet seach as most major mobile phone companies have websites where you can even buy the card online.

With some companies, such as Vodafone, in cetain countries if you buy a pay-as-you-go sim card, you get €10 of free phone credit. This means that the card itself costs next to nothing.

If you have teenagers who are likely to be going off on their own, but you’d like to have a safe-guard against them getting lost, then mobile phones are an excellent way of ensuring that no one gets horribly lost or into a sticky situation with language barriers etc.

Whether you think you would definitely like to purchase a phone card abroad, or if it’s just a passing thought, then don’t forget to ask your exchange partner for advice on the best deals and cheapest tariffs.

It is undoubtedly a good idea to get to know your prospective home exchange partners before doing an exchange. In any well prepared,  decently planned home exchange, conversation prior to the vacation is a must.

Not only does it provide you with a great assistance in finding your way through a) the house, b) the district, and c) the city, but it can also arm you with a wealth of information about top tourist attractions, restaurant recommendations, upcoming concerts and shows etc. The most experienced, expert guide you could have for your vacation is sat there at the other end of the internet, just waiting for your message. So it makes a lot of sense on a practical level to have a fair amount of contact before you set off for your vacation.

On a personal level too, it makes an awful lot of sense to build up a rapport with your home exchangers. If there are things about your home that you are worried about, or that require special care, then establishing a sense of trust between the exchangers is the ideal way of approaching this. It’s good for everyone’s peace of mind to talk through the plans and get to know fellow exchangers so that you feel comfortable and relaxed by the time that your vacations come along.

So, how to set about doing this? Our website provides you with an internal messaging system which is easy to use, and which sends you notifications to your email inbox when you receive a new message. Alternatively you can swap email address, or telephone numbers. An excellent way of building up a solid, personal relationship with your exchange partners is to use Skype. International calls via phone lines can be costly. However, if you download Skype, all you need is a microphone, and you can make either free international calls, or international calls at a very cheap rate (depending on the area).

By all accounts, it’s worthwhile making the effort, and with email and Skype, the only cost is the time you spend.

When you go on vacation, the question of what you should do with your pet can be a bit tricky. Whilst taking them with you brings its own questions, leaving them at home had some of its own issues.

When considering whether to take your pet on a home exchange with you, the first thing you need to check is whether your exchange family accepts pets. If not, then you should talk to them and ask whether they would consider looking after your pet if you were to leave it in the house. If they agree, then you will need to assess whether you think your exchange partners will be able to manage to give your pet the level of care that it may need.

If however your exchange partners accepts pets and you are travelling only by car, then remember to make plenty of stops and take enough bottled water, toys, and reminders of home (familiar smells, objects, etc) in order to reduce the anxiety experienced by your pet.

If you have to cross borders, then it’s worth-while looking up getting your pet a pet-passport, but make sure that you do this with plenty of advanced planning (a minimum of 6 months before the time that you plan to take your vacations.) Also, you will need to research which airlines will cater for animal transportation.

The important thing to weigh up is the discomfort that your pet may potentially experience. Whilst travelling can be a stressful experience for an animal, leaving them for weeks at a time can make them feel disconcerted and depressed. It depends on your pet. There is no single formula - you have to make a judgement based on your journey and on your pets needs.

At least with home exchange you will have the opportunity to talk with prospective home exchange partners who will allow you to take your animal to stay with you in their home.

Home exchange can mean a variety of things.

It can mean flat exchange. House exchange. Mansion exchange. Hut exchange. Or even, boat exchange!

If you’re fortunate enough to own a boat, you can offer it up for home exchange and that way increase your chances of receiving home exchange proposals from people all around the world.

Also, if you are thinking of taking a trip in your boat, but you would also liked to spend some of the holiday on land, you could always arrange a home exchange in a town that has a port where you could rest your boat. Tuscany would be a wonderful example of a city where you might like to make a stop.

Home exchange is not simply restricted to typical conceptions of what a “home” is. You can be as creative as you like, and if it’s a home to you then it’s good enough to get a profile on the website and see if people are interested in exchanging.

One particular type of home exchange is a study exchange. Whether you’re taking time out from work to study, or you’re a full time student who’s looking to do a study abroad program, home exchange can definitely help you out!

All that you need is to have a residence where people can come and stay in. You don’t have to be a home or a mortgage owner - if you are renting you are eligible to do home exchanges.

To help find like minded people, you can post a message in our forum entitled; “Study exchanges.” Equally, if this is something that interests you, you may want to consider doing a non-simultaneous exchange. This is where you vacate your home whilst the other family comes to stay, and they do the same for you, so that you are able to accommodate your own study and course time tables.

Alternatively, you could do a “hosting” exchange. This is when you have the family or people (or person!) come to stay whilst you are still in your home, and in return they put you up when you go over to do your study.

Home exchange is flexible, and there are a variety of ways of managing timing for study programmes and learning abroad.

Home exchanges can be used to celebrate a variety of special occassions, whether you go en masse or as a single family unit.

Something unique to couples however, is the idea of an anniversary exchange. If you are interested in celebrating a wedding anniversary or a relationship anniversary of any nature abroad, then home exchange is an economic and romantic way of doing this.

If you’re wondering how best to describe your house in order to appeal to other users, here are a few handy tips.

1) Form.

When people look through the profile of your home, whether they realize it or not, they are not just looking for information about your home. They’re also looking for information about you as a person. So if you write everything in CAPSLOCK it might make it a little difficult to read. If the text is not punctuated very well (for example, with double commas, careless spelling, or incomplete sentences) might give the impression of carelessness or untidiness.

2) Style

The words you use can be very important.

Take these three examples:

Brick house located near cost, good view, short walk to sea, easy footpaths, kitchen has lino floor, green bedroom carpets, patio outside.

A beautiful brick house that you’ll absolutely fall in love with, with the sea on the doorstep. Huge space, and it has a mesmerizing kitchen lino, and emerald green curtains to die for. You’ll have the most amazing time of your life here.

An attractive brick house that has the beach within a comfortable walking distance. Inside the house is beautifully furnished and cosy, with plenty of space. There is a patio garden ideal for having breakfast, and a very calming ambience. We are very happy living here.

Of course, some of what you write depends on your personality. However, it is important to bear in mind that if you write using a monotonous tone, focusing on irrelevant details, then you will not be doing your home justice. On the other hand, beware of the “over-sell”. If you make the description too enthusiastic, people might feel less willing to trust it.

So it’s important to keep these two points in mind. Make your descriptions neat, tidy, with good spelling and grammar. Also, strike the right tone describing simply the benefits of your home, without doing a “hard-sale”.

You can have a lot of fun in the summer if you have access to a kitchen.

There are some really great fun treats you can do with the kids (or whoever else may be childish enough to enjoy this kind of fun, aka: most adults ).

For example, mini lolly making.

You can buy for about 50 cents a bag of lolly sticks, and a couple of packs of fromage frais (i.e.: Petit Filous). Then, with the kids (or the adults, whatever!) you can have great fun piercing a tiny whole in the lid of the yogurt, and inserting the lolly stick so that it stays completely upright. You then carefully place them in the freezer with the lolly stick poking upright.

Wait for a few hours, and then take them out. Now, what you need to do is turn the lollies upside down and remove the yogurt pot. Hold the lolly stick at the bottom and you will have a frozen mini-yogurt free of preservatives, delicious to taste, refreshingly cold, and a snappy and creative task that you can have a great time doing!

This is something that you can uniquely do with a home exchange, where you have a kitchen to play around with. In the summer, having access to a freezer counts!

Going abroad can provide you with the perfect opportunity to give your style a bit of a re-vamp. If you’re looking to reinvent yourself, or give yourself a new look, or simply just refresh a little and top-up the style you’re already working, then going abroad can truly be an inspiration.

Better still, if you go abroad doing a home exchange, the pennies that you save on accommodation mean that you’ll have a lot more money to enjoy yourself with. You will have a lot more cash to burn on site seeing,  on exciting activities, and if you want to, on splashing out on some new outfits.

The clothes available in the shops in other countries will be totally different, with their own distinct style that gives you a new lease of life. You could buy a few accessories to vamp up your wardrobe, and treat yourself to a new hair-style.

It can be said that each country tends to have it’s own unique craft of hair-styling. When you leave the hair-dressers after having a French blow dry (for example) you’ll probably look in the mirror seeing a version of yourself that is more different that what you ever imagined.

It’s a great way to enhance your look without spending a great deal of money. Plus, it affords you the opportunity of looking really different to all your friends (and everyone else who goes to high street shops to buy their clothes.)

So if you’re looking for a new look, travel abroad through home exchange is a great chance to add some sleek new touches to the cosmopolitan you!

Transparent garbage bags. The Next Big Thing. That will certainly teach us to separate our bio-degradable goods from our plastics and our non-shiny card. Just imagine. All of your rubbish laid out in a chichi modern transparent waste-disposal bag for the whole street to see.

Those failing to comply with the garbage separation rules will be castigated, punished, reprimanded. Made an example of.

Sounds a little strange, huh? But life-style changes are systemic. Yet when we think of how about ten years ago, practically everyone was lumping their plastics, their aluminium cans, their bottles, their card with all the other junk into the trash can without a second thought for the environment, we have to accept that change happens.

Alternative life-style forms are being rapidly assimilated into the “normal” way of living. Life-style habits that ten years ago seemed to be the occupation of a few well-meaning (yet ultimately hopeless crazies) are rapidly being incorporated into the so called normal life-style.

Home exchange can easily been seen as one of these “green” features. Something that ten years back only a few Euro-phile cranks like my parents were doing. Yet now it is receiving more and more press coverage, people are signing up to the free home exchange sites every day, and the concept is rapidly becoming better known.

We live in an exciting age. Which is all the better for sweetly cheap and fun-filled holidays!