Open versus Closed Home Exchange Services

When choosing a home exchange company, it's important to know what you're getting. There are numerous differences between each one, but one of the major differentiators is whether they offer an open or closed system. This means whether or not they allow non-members to contact members.

We believe a members-only system is the best one. The issue came up today because a member of another home exchange company contacted us in order to contact one of the members of our company. We told him that we'd love to have him as a member and that if he wanted to contact one of our members, he should join the service.

That's because most of our members prefer to be contacted only be people who have taken the time and made the small financial investment of actually joining the same organization. Many of our members figure that if the person wanting to do an exchange with them hasn't even bothered to share information about their home in a catalogue or on the web with other members, why would they want to share their home with them. Furthermore, many of our members know that in case something goes wrong with their exchange partner, we always have a record of payment and contact information about each member. The same can't be said for open systems (or free bulletin boards) where members are encouraged to exchange with non-members, who aren't on record with the exchange company.