Today, at work, in your activities, your vacation and of course in your home exchange, something that can heavily influence the success or failure of what you do, is your attitude. If you think positively, it usually ends up paying off.  On the other hand, if you are defeatist, negative, fearful and reluctant, then you’ll drive away your potential exchange partners.

Using this premise, and a positive open attitude means that the dialogue you will have with potential exchange partners will be more pleasant. Your exchange and your discussions offer important signs that will be the triggers that will make people want to come or not see what’s happening in your area.

And it is quite normal, we all want to exchange with people who seem nice, funny and postive. So. It’s time to conquer the exchange field, put on your broadest smile, and listen to your little inner voice that tells you: “ouaaa they look too cool, that’s it, we’re going! This may be a good holiday!” That is the best attitude you can have for home exchange.

Take full advantage of home exchange by adopting a positive attitude, believing that a smile can change your destiny, and let the magic happen!

If you have a flight in the evening, it can be a real drag if you stay in a hotel and have to check out in the morning, then spend the day in an unfamiliar city, with all your holiday luggage.

With home exchange, you don’t have this problem. It makes your time spent travelling a lot more flexible.

The same applies if you do a vehicle exchange too. Clearly, you have to enter into an agreement of trust with the other party. But it frees you up from some of the time obligations and constraints that can cause problems if you’re dealing with a paid-for service. However, make sure that if you’re doing a home exchange that is precisely simultaneous, it can be important to check not only the date, but also the hours of arrival.

Tourists can often be a tantalizing target for pick-pockets. As visitors in an area, you’re unlikely to know the safe areas from the not quite so safe areas. You’re going to be carrying a lot of valuable stuff about your person. You’re going to be relaxing and taking it easy, and so you won’t be concentrating quite so much. Also, if you’re in a different country, you may not be accustomed to the customs regarding personal space and contact, and so you might be less able to spot and avoid a potential pick-pocket.

So here are a few bits of advice to bear in mind, so that you won’t be running any unnecessary risks.

1) You could get a bum-bag, so as to keep all your valuables in a place where you’d definitely notice if someone tried to get at them. Alternatively, make sure that you never ever keep anything valuable in your back-pocket.

2) Try not to stand out conspicuously as a tourist. Avoid wearing a camera around your neck, holding a large map, wearing clothes that sharply stand out against the local attire. If you’re standing in a crowded area, speaking in English, then try to keep the volume down.

3) Buy yourself a phrase-book a good few weeks before you take your trip, and during this time try to learn some of the phrases that you will need, and - critically - their responses. You don’t need to be fluent, but you will blend in a lot better and won’t provoke any hostility if you at least make an effort to ask in shops and restuarants for what you want in the national language.

4) Before going on your exchange, make sure to ask your exchange partner for a list of the local emergency service numbers, and a list of the nearest hospital, dentist, police station, doctors etc.

5) If you’re planning to eat at a restaurant, ask your exchange partner for some recommendations. This will save you from accidentally landing upon a typically touristic restaurants that will over charge and exploit you.

By all means, if you want the best advice from someone who knows the area impeccably well, then there will be no one better to advise you than your exchange partner. Sometime tourists can be exploited, so it’s a good idea to get the low-down before you embark upon your trip.

In an age where we live everything at a galactic speed, it’s very difficult to remember how we ever got by before we had the internet. I mean, it’s a tricky enough job to remember how we got by before the age of broad-band. Those pesky dial-up connections that could take up to six times or more to even connect, then the five minute wait to be taken to the page you were looking for. Then another five minute wait to be taken to the next one. And so it went on…

But these days, the internet goes a lot faster and it helps us do one million and one things every week. Imagine how it could help you on holiday. You see adverts for a festival or a concert when you’re out, but don’t take down the details. When you get back to the home you’re staying in, you can google it and you will have all the information you need at your disposal.

It can also be useful on holiday for printing out maps, getting route directions, making bookings, checking out restaurant menus, finding opening times and prices, and looking up the history of something that caught your interest during the day. You can even use it to tranlate languages! Of course some people will take their lap top on holiday. But for those of us who like to disconnect, it can be a real benefit if you do a home exchange in a house with internet.

Of course, it’s important to consult with your home exchange partners before doing the exchange to establish what the rules are for using the computer and the internet. This kind of agreement is paramount. But in most cases where families will have broadband, it works out in everyone’s interests to use the internet at home, as it can be incredibly useful.

One of the joys of exploring a new city is finding the independent cafes, book stores and record stores. If you’re hailing in from the UK, the sorry story is that these precious cultural artefacts are soon to be diminished.

It’s true. As high-street chains take over, saturating every city with pretty much the same stock, the same lay-out, the same ambience, it can really start to feel like the world is becoming one small place that covers a big surface area.

So when you go away, it can be really rewarding to find a store, cafe or restaurant that gives you a new vibe. This can be that it awakes in you some old memory of an experience long forgotten; that it introduces you to a new style of music; that it helps you completely disconnect from your day to day life; that it relaxes you; that it excites your senses; that it enables you to explore completely new products and support local, independent business.

Getting out and away from the monotonous homogenous dredge can be one of the purest joys of a holiday. So make sure you talk to your exchange partner, and you may want to invest in a local guide such a Lonely Planet travel guide, for example.

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.

In the few days just before setting off for your home exchange, there are some areas that you need to think about preparing for the incoming family. As a big part of home exchange is based upon reciprocity, it’s important to think ahead about how you would like to be treated, and then try to provide that for your exchange partner.

In an exchange, one of the most central aspects is offering a clean home. So before you set off, think not only about leaving your home tidy, but also well cleaned. Little details like cleaning the oven and the microwave really make the world of difference.

If you are precious about your towels, then take a few minutes to consider how many people will be staying, and then find enough towels - that you don’t mind other people using - for them all to have.

You could also think about occassional problems that you might have in your home. For example, if you live somewhere where you have to suffer the intermittent power-cut, think about leaving out some torches or candles for the incoming guests. Alternatively, if you have noisy neighbours, you could suggest to the guests that they bring earplugs with them.

To make our home exchanges the best that they can be (which is pretty darn great!) then allow yourself some time to think about the small touches that could raise the quality of your partners’ stay from good to excellent.

This idea, in turn, will give your own holidays that extra touch of wholesomeness. It’s what home exchange is all about.

When we think of all of the tremendously impressive architecture we have imprinting ourselves on our own selves on our natural environment, or the advances we have made in medicine over the centuries (transplants, genetic screening), it would seem that we are pretty smart. So… washing machines… shouldn’t be that perplexing.

Yet they are! And how!

There are some things in life that are sent to test us. Setting the video is one of those. Working out how to use a foreign washing machine is another.

So one of the things that we can do for our exchange partners, to make everything run a lot smoother (and not least to put our minds at rest about things getting broken) is to leave out some instructions of how the main house-hold gismos work. If you’re doing exchanges with people where there is no common language, then why not try a couple of diagrams? Biro sketches.

So what should we bear in mind for instructions, technology wise?

The washing machine.

The dishwasher.

The shower.

The heating.

The hot-water.

The television.

The VCR.

The radio.

The computer.

The internet/Wifi.

There may be more, depending on how technologically advanced your house is. But some things to bear in mind.

One of the annoying things about changing currency is the short change that you get left with that you can’t convert back. It’s particularly irritating. I personally have the habit of keeping the loose change of the foreign currency floating around in my purse for about a month after taking the vacations. Only to wind up pulling my hair out and having to muffle my screams of frustration with my sleeve everytime that I come to pay for something in a shop. And then end up burying it in the garden in an act of irrational anger.

Home exchange has many advantages, great and small. One of the mini-advantages is that you can leave your small change in the home that you’ve stayed in, and if you’re lucky the other family will leave theirs in yours. This not only saves you the horrendous extended stress period post currency change, where you have this money but you don’t really quite know what to do with it. But it also means you´ll have some small change to work with when you get back. (Let’s face it, the idea of guarding the money in a safe place for the next year without forgetting it by the time the next round of holidays comes along, is a little steep.)

So home swapping could potentially solve the niggling problem of the loose change that comes flooding back after a holiday. Also, things such as having fresh milk in the regrigrator. Cheese. Fresh bread. A nice cup of tea and a cheese toastie is usually just want you need when you get back late at night after a day or two spent travelling. And lo and behold, if you arrive back home and there’s nothing there, it puts a dampener on things. Having the home family having just left means that not only will your house be sparkling clean when you arrive, but also that there’s a good chance there will be fresh good and milk left over.

Just a couple of the mini-advantages that home swap has to offer…