|
Global Home Exchange
at 4homex.com

Home exchange is a money saving
vacation alternative
|

|
Contact us
|
Login
|
Home Exchange Press Release
Travel across your region or around the world, enjoy comfortable, spacious
lodgings and pay nothing for accommodation with a home exchange.
Home exchange is the smart and
fashionable way to vacation. By trading homes for vacations, families,
seniors and singles can enjoy free accommodation wherever they travel. Swapping
homes for holidays is a practical and sensible vacation alternative. Not only do
you save by not paying for lodging (hotel rooms, surcharges, resort fees
and taxes), you can also save by not paying for restaurant meals, parking,
laundry, internet connection, and much more.
A home exchange allows you to enjoy
all the benefits of a house, instead of just a room. This means you can enjoy
the multi rooms, a yard and fully equipped kitchen. Home swaps give you tons of
space. This is especially appealing for families. With a house swap, you have
room to breathe instead of being cramped up in a hotel room. Exchanging homes
for vacations offers more space Instead of a hotel room and allows the entire
family to stay under the same roof. This kind of accommodation is well-suited
for both short term and extended stays. Home exchange offers more amenities than
hotels, such as multi bedrooms, fully equipped kitchens, fireplaces, and private
hot tubs and pools. Home swaps offer more privacy. Free from the
environment that comes with noisy hotels, privacy is one of the biggest benefits
of any home exchange. No more cramped rooms, inflated prices, noisy hallways and
surcharges.
Accommodations offered for exchange can vary from primary
residences to second homes, from one bedroom apartments, condos, time shares,
flats, cottages, castles, villas, houses of all sizes, shapes and colors to
luxury mansion home swaps.
Global is a family based home exchange
service. We support community services that help children with
special needs, an outreach to seniors to reconnect them to the community
and a service that assists young couples.
Global Home Exchange in the news
By Kevin Brooker
Shelley Lynch had been dreaming about a
family vacation to Europe for a long time. But as each spring rolled around, the
Stittsville, Ont., teacher and her husband, David, would tally up the steep
costs, then reluctantly put away the travel brochures for another year. Shelley
began to wonder if they could ever save up enough for such a vacation while
their teenaged daughters were still at home.
One day, though, Shelley stumbled across a small newspaper item about a vacation
concept that goes by what some veteran travelers call two magic words:
"Home exchange."
The idea is elegantly simple, says Shelley. "You stay at our house while
we stay at your house. We even use each other's cars. Total cost: Zero
dollars." Now that sounded like something the Lynches could swing.
The key, of course, was finding the appropriately located European family who
just happens to want to vacation in Stittsville, near Ottawa. And that turned
out to be a surmountable problem, thanks to the recent profusion of online
home-exchange services.
The idea of swapping houses for vacation purposes is believed to have begun in
Europe in the early post-war years. Teachers and professors, in particular,
began compiling contacts with colleagues in other countries. In those days a few
letters were traded, references were supplied and then train tickets were
booked. In what has become something of a home-exchange tradition, the two
parties would often meet en route to trade house keys and to wish a personal bon
voyage. After that, you lived like a local in your colleague's home, treating it
as you would your own.
By the 1960s, the idea had spread to budget-minded travel addicts of all kinds.
International clubs were formed, producing annual catalogues with photos, house
descriptions, and the parameters of where and when might be suitable. By the
1990s, savvy operators that they are, home exchangers were among the first to
grasp Internet technology. Now there are dozens of sites worldwide where the
proverbial dream villa in Provence is only a few clicks away.
The Lynches' first foray, last summer, proved delightful. On one of several
sites she had joined, Shelley found a match with a family from Aylsham, a town
in eastern England. After a flurry of e-mails and phone calls extolling the
virtues of their respective homes (and building a friendship, as it almost
inevitably does), both parties took the plunge and went on to have outstanding
vacations in the home of the other.
"It was absolutely beautiful over there," recalls Shelley. "Not
touristy in the least, and it was perfect for trips to places like London and
Cambridge. Our kids loved it, too."
Meanwhile, back in Stittsville, the English family was having a ball touring the
Ottawa region, as well as getting the royal treatment from the Lynches'
neighbours.
"For our first time, it couldn't have gone better," says Shelley.
"They were actually veterans of 20 home exchanges, so they led us through
all the steps, like making the basic contract and getting insurance-company
approval to use each other's car."
As for finding the right match in the first place, Shelley notes that it
requires some organization and tenacity. "I scanned a lot of listings and
sent out a ton of e-mails to entice people with undeclared destination
preferences, but I didn't always receive a ton of replies." Getting the
family computer hooked up to Sympatico High Speed service also helped the
process by enabling much faster searches, she says.
These days, scanning home-exchange sites is a regular habit, and the central
feature of the Lynch family vacation plans. This summer, they're headed for that
mythical place in the south of France, just a few kilometres from the
Mediterranean. "It's the French family's first exchange, so now we're
leading the way," says Shelley, who just got through reading A Year in
Provence and can't wait for July.
Still, Shelley is not about to rest on her laurels. "I've already posted
our listing for 2003. We're thinking New York City."
Global Home Exchange
Although most sites are international in scope, this Nanaimo, B.C. based
matchmaker is a great place to start. Unlike most commercial operators, you can
view the listings for free complete with e-mail contact information. You pay
only to post your own advertisements. There's also a level of personalized
attention from the owners that Shelley Lynch found appealing.
Back
to media
For all media
inquiries, please contact Global Home Exchange
through our Contact
Global form
|