The Home Exchanger

Share your summer home exchange tale with us

The recent movie, The Holiday, documents a romance between two strangers forged via a home exchange.

But, you don't have to be famous to tell your home swap story. We would encourage you to document your own travels while home swapping this summer. Feel free to e-mail us your real-life tales and photos of your summer swap.

We'll post them to The Home Exchanger blog and include them in the home exchange diary gallery found at the top right of the screen. Currently, we have home exchange diaries from Iceland, New Jersey and Ireland.

More tales are welcome.

Real-Life Home Exchange Romance!

In the new Cameran Diaz-Jude Law-Kate Winslet-Jack Black movie, The Holiday coming out next month, romances bloom when two strangers swap homes.

This happens in real life too! One of Intervac's members in Paris home swapped with a couple in Colorado. Romance bloomed when he met a friend of theirs in Colorado. Now the  two are dating!

The Denver NBC station did a story about the home swap turned love match yesterday. Click here to see the story, which also gives a good introduction on how to do a vacation home exchange.

Intervac: As Seen on The Today Show!

OK - this is a biggie that has been in the works for a long time. The Today Show profiled two Intervac customers as they did their home exchange!

One family lived in Colorado, and the other in the DC area. After the exchange segment, Al Roker interviewed Travel and Leisure's Heidi Mitchell about how to do a home exchange.

This is a fabulous piece and really shows what it's like to do a home swap.  Check it out here, then click on The Today Show link.

Intervac featured on CBS News in Boston and Austin

Click here to view a good CBS TV story about home exchanging, featuring Intervac members Scott and Laura Haas.  I am also interviewed.

There has been a tremendous amount of media coverage about Intervac and home exchanging this summer. A selection of media coverage includes:  an interview with National Public Radio, two features in the New York Times, a story in the Chicago Tribune and much more. Clearly, home exchanging is catching on in the US like wildfire.  Intervac has been around since 1953, and this level of interest in the US is unprecendented in our history.

Become a member of our large home exchanging community! Click here to join Intervac: until August 30, 2006 you will receive a FREE catalogue from Intevac if you become a web member.* Simply put "The Home Exchanger" to answer the question how did you hear about Intervac.

*While supplies last.

Intervac in the New York Times (twice)

The New York Times has done two articles on Intervac and home exchanging in the past month. The first featured Intervac custome Lori Horne (photo at left), a longtime exchanger. Click here to read about it.

The second quotes me, Jessica Jaffe - I'm the US Representative for Intervac - several times, and tells how home exchanging has become a sub-culture.  Click here to read that story.

Cameron Diaz Movie About Home Exchanging

I just viewed the preview of this movie coming out this holiday season, called appropriately The Holiday.  It stars Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as an American and Brit who exchange homes with each other for Christmas. It also stars Jack Black and Jude Law.

From the trailer it looks like they meet each other through a fictional home exchanging agency similar our to own agency, Intervac.

Based on this movie, if you do a home swap in England, you could meet Jude Law. Still the movie looks really good, and surprisingly looks like it could be sort of accurate depiction of the joys of swapping homes.  Minus Jude Law.

Intervac Mentioned in Barron's

Barron's, the financial publication, recently wrote a story about the best way to find vacation properties.  Here's what they had to say about Intervac:

Intervac ( http://www.intervac-online.com) has been in the business since 1953, and claims 10,000 listings in 50 countries. Independent organizations are in charge of the swap service in each country. Go to http://www.intervacusa.com for regional information and rates in the States, as well as a thorough frequently-asked-question section on the home-exchange process in the U.S. Fees start at $65 a year. For that, you get access to U.S. listings and your personal entries go into the database. You can browse listings while you're deciding whether to join.

Click here to read the whole article.

London Hospitality Exchange - How Much Did We Save?

We had a wonderful time on our hospitality exchange.  I always like to tally up how much we saved on hotels after an exchange.  We stayed in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, for 6 nights for free. 

An average hotel room in London costs about $150 a night.  So on hotel costs we saved about $900. The room we stayed in had its own ensuite bathroom and was very nice, pretty equivalent to a nice hotel room in a lot of ways.

In addition to the cost savings, it was nice to get to know Between the Commons, an area of London that we knew nothing about. We stayed less than one block off Northcote Rd, which was a vibrant street full of cafes, boutiques and gourmet food stores. Public transportation was very convenient - it took 5 minutes to get to Victoria Station in Central London. And we had lots of fun with our host.  Overall, we felt we were living how other Londoners live.

Intervac Annual General Meeting to Begin Tomorrow

One leg of our hospitality exchange has ended and we have now arrived in Rhodes to participate in the Intervac annual general meeting. The location changes each year, but there has been a meeting of the organizers in all the countries where Intervac is located for decades. The purpose is to renew relationships with our colleagues and to plan how to offer even better home exchange services to our customers. There will be more on this after the meeting begins tomorrow.

                                                   
 

London Hospitality Exchange: Tate Modern Museum

Building on the trip to the Modernism exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum a few days earlier, I visited the Tate Modern yesterday. There were two exhibits focused on three 20th century artists. I was unimpressed with all three. And aside from two beautiful Picassos, a Monet and a room full of Rothkos, the permanent exhibition was also a disappointment. It's currently being rehung for the first time since the former power plant was first turned into a modern art mecca, which may explain the lackluster scene. The redone galleries will open in May. My favorite part was located on the edge of the permanent exhibit where a dark room full of doodads from the Freud museum were on display in boxes with description related to the content. Hard to describe but worth seeking out.

The real highlight of the excursion was walking across the Millennium Bridge. Despite the diagonal rain, it was a nice walk and the first time I was able to do it. When I lived in London a few years earlier, the bridge --referred to at the time as the Wobbly Bridge-- was closed because it shook so much. Even in the wind yesterday, it held steady.