The Boston Globe has published an informative account of a family's recent trip to
Ireland. It shows that home exchanging is the means to a vacation and what you do once you're there is still your choice. You can make the opportunities afforded to you by the home swap itself the centerpiece of your vacation or just enjoy a typical vacation of sightseeing.
For the family featured in this Boston Globe story, they swapped homes and searched for their roots in Ireland.
I recenty saw The Holiday and was pleased to see home swapping reaching the mainstream. The movie certainly captured what I consider the greatest benefit of home exchanging; th
e opportunity to have a real travel experience by living and interacting with real locals from another part of the world. It's a credit to the director that despite the fact she has never actually conducted a house swap, she was able to capture this so well.
As the owner of a house exchange service, I certainly would have like to have seen more about the actual logistics of the swap itself. I think the transferring of the house keys, trading of the cars, leaving of welcome notes and gifts could have provided good comedy fodder. There was some funny interplay between Jude Law and Cameron Diaz capturing her inability to find anything in her new home at first that played on the actual home exchange. I would have liked to have seen more of this.
But, I can't complain. This movie is bringing a great form of travel to many who have never heard of it before. Most will probably not be open to the idea of a stranger living in their house, but many will, and for that we are thankful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Daniel Johnson, of London's Evening Standard, wrote an article about how hard it is to live in one of the world's most costly cities, even if you are making $US175,000 a year. I used to live in London, and it was crazy expensive. Want an example? When my now-husband and I went to Pizza Express, a cheap chain restaurant, the total bill was $US50 for a large cheese pizza and two glasses of wine (and tip). Insane.
Daniel offers tips on how to save money:
"Foreign holidays are the next major item - not a necessity, of course, but given the stresses of city life we can hardly be surprised that London families want to spend some time together in the sun.
My family never spends as much as £5,000 a year, but then we don't usually go abroad. If we do, we negotiate a home exchange. Other families, however, report that a week in a midranking resort for a family of four in summer can cost £5,000 - and more in winter. More than £10,000 a year on holidays is not uncommon."
But the costs of living are high too in the US, and we personally would not have been able to go to Europe at all if we didn't exchange through Intervac. Because we didn't stay in hotels, cooked some meals ourselves and didn't rent a car during our 2 week trip to Ireland, we saved at least $6,000.
