Home swapping can make travel more affordable and easier for families | Canada Voices

The rising cost of fuel is likely why your next overseas trip is more expensive. Travellers must now search harder than ever for deals.

While flying is pricier, you can find a way to pay less for your accommodations, which account for 42 per cent of overall travel costs, according to Statistics Canada. Consider home swapping as an option.

It’s especially helpful if you have a family. Families prefer Airbnb over hotels because you get a kitchen, a living room and a place to do laundry. Home swapping gives you all that, plus it’s nearly free. We’ve tried it on HomeExchange, a global platform for homeowners swapping accommodations, where all you need to pay for is the yearly membership fee of around $325 and be willing to put up your home in exchange.

Home swapping is still a tiny portion of the travel accommodations market. For example, HomeExchange has 250,000 members compared to Airbnb’s five million hosts. Some people don’t like the idea of strangers eating in their kitchen and sleeping in their beds.

But home swapping is getting more popular. Membership in Canada grew by 41 per cent in 2025, according to a HomeExchange representative. Although HomeExchange is one of the best-known home-swapping platforms, there are others: Kindred, PeopleLikeUs, HomeLink, Intervac, and ThirdHome.

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As a couple who retired from our full-time jobs in our early 30s to travel the world, we’ve stayed in more than 100 Airbnbs over the six years of our nomadic life. We switched to HomeExchange once we became parents, and that experience not only saved us money, it reduced our stress by providing a much more comfortable way to travel. Because it’s a lived-in home rather than a ghost hotel, the kitchen is fully stocked, there is laundry with detergent, and often a changing table and crib.

Here’s how it works: You can do simultaneous exchanges or non-simultaneous changes. Simultaneous exchange means you swap homes at the same time. Non-simultaneous exchange means you earn points for hosting and can use those points later at your guest’s home or another home. These points cannot be converted for cash.

The biggest highlight is the kindness we receive from hosts. When we had to cancel our Valencia stay due to a natural disaster, another host in Barcelona took in our family of three, plus two friends who were also stranded.

A year later, the Valencia host invited us back using the same points we already gave her, and greeted us with a translator for our limited Spanish and a stuffed bunny for our son. In Airbnb terms, what our Valencia home-exchange host did would be equivalent to returning the money you gave them when you couldn’t stay so you can use it to book the stay again the following year.

The sense of community and trust on the platform is strong because members put up their own home for swapping. Reciprocity makes the whole system work because you treat their home the same way you would want your home to be treated.

Also, when staying at someone’s home for little to no cost, you feel grateful and go out of your way to take care of it. An Airbnb or hotel is more transactional.

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That said, home swapping isn’t perfect. Downsides include the time and effort spent to find a suitable exchange, limited flexibility and locations, and the effort to clean up and organize your home for a guest.

Also, if you’re travelling to the U.S., customs may confuse home swapping with house or pet sitting – which can be misconstrued as providing services for compensation in the form of accommodation, and as a result getting denied entry.

Since no money or services change hands, home swapping is considered a hospitality agreement, not a commercial one, so make sure you clearly state that you are a tourist visiting a private home, the same way you would stay at a friend’s house, without paying them or getting paid.

Having stayed in home swaps in Croatia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada and Spain, we can say that while saving money on accommodations is nice, nothing beats staying in a home where you matter more than your wallet.

Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung retired in their 30s and are the bestselling authors of Quit Like a Millionaire and Parent Like a Millionaire (Without Being One). They are affiliated with HomeExchange on their blog but did receive any compensation for this article.