Swapping Your Home for a Vacation? What You Need to Know

Would you let a stranger vacation in your home if you got free lodging in return?

A free stay in someone else’s home, long a budget-friendly way to travel, has become more appealing as costs rise and travelers seek out local vibes.

Home-swapping platform People Like Us has more than 10,300 homes listed on its site. Chief Executive Drew Seitam says, by the end of June, members had completed or arranged for 30% more swaps than in all of 2023. Another platform, HomeExchange, has more than 175,000 members, a number it says has grown 17% this year.

Home-swap platforms like these charge annual membership fees north of $100. Swaps also happen more informally in Facebook groups and between friends. Travellers can do a simultaneous swap, where they travel during the same dates, but can also plan to host each other at different times.

While home exchanges can save travellers thousands on lodging, they aren’t for everyone. Home swappers give the following tips to consider before listing your home.

Get a read on the situation

The person you are swapping with shouldn’t feel like a stranger by the time you arrive, home exchangers say.

Barbara Osterwisch , 66 years old, and her husband, both retirees, have swapped their home in Houston and their cabin in Texas’ Hill Country for stays in the Netherlands, France, Canada, Austria and California. They video chat with potential matches to establish rapport, and to give tours of their homes. Many exchangers begin planning their swaps months, if not years, in advance. This gives ample time for getting to know one another, Osterwisch says.

Apprehensive travellers should consider a swap within a few hours’ drive as a trial run, rather than jumping into an exchange in another country, she says.

Home swaps aren’t for tourists who like everything just so, travelers say. Unlike a short-term rental, home swaps are more likely to be people’s primary residences. People leave clothes in the closets, tools in the garage and photos on the walls. Living in someone’s home is part of the charm, but it isn’t the same as staying in a hotel with a front desk and staff to fix issues that arise.

Using a platform can ensure some safety and quality guarantees, swappers say. Some companies, such as Kindred, a members-only platform, offer 24/7 text support for problems.

Osterwisch says she and her husband have stayed in touch with the families they swapped with and now have connections all over the world.

Check your insurance policy

Some travelers use membership-based services to provide supplemental insurance or support if things go wrong.

Oleg Pynda is a 31-year-old New York City tech worker who has swapped with travellers from France. He says, based on his experience, U.S. travellers tend to worry more about strangers staying in their homes and damaging their belongings. Most of the initial messages he gets from U.S.-based travellers emphasise their trustworthiness, while European travelers focus on the quality of the home they are offering to exchange.

Pynda says he is comfortable with people staying in his apartment for a short time, so he doesn’t feel compelled to sign up for services that provide extra insurance for members. The people he swaps with end up becoming familiar to him and don’t feel like complete strangers.

He says his lease prohibits situations with a monetary exchange, such as a short-term rental or sublet, but not home exchanges.

Homeowners and renters-insurance policies might limit the number of days a guest can stay in your home during a swap, says Janet Ruiz of the Insurance Information Institute. They might also limit compensation for damage done to hosts’ and visitors’ possessions while people are in your home.

“People don’t want to tell their insurance agents what they are doing,” she says. Having a conversation with the agent before anything happens can help you make informed choices about coverage, she adds, including whether to buy a supplemental policy for vacation-rental coverage.

Travelers should also ensure the home they are staying in has coverage. And renters ought to check their leases before entering into a swap.

Some swappers let travellers borrow their cars. Ruiz recommends first asking the person you’re exchanging with about their driver’s licenses and insurance coverage.

Shawn and Bill Personke , from Michigan, had a potential swap fall through because the other family wanted to use their car. They had promised it to someone else while they were away.

Some travelers say they lock valuables in one room of the house or put them in the trunks of their cars and take the keys with them. Problems can arise, but none of the travellers interviewed had any horror stories to share.

“My only regret regarding home exchanging is not figuring it out sooner,” Osterwisch says.

Travel somewhere new

Marina Wanders , a photographer, lives in a suburb of Austin, Texas. She floated the idea of a summer house swap in a Facebook group. A Dallas woman, whose home has a backyard swimming pool and a shower with a chandelier in it, responded and said she was game. Wanders says Dallas isn’t her ideal vacation destination, but as a 29-year-old single mom of two, she looks for affordable travel alternatives.

“I’m like a middle-class American single mom and make enough to pay my bills and buy $40 shampoo, but I do not have a chandelier in my shower,” Wanders says.

She decided to go for the swap because she can give her sons a memorable vacation in a beautiful home while saving thousands on lodging. The Dallas family will stay in her home during the same dates.

Travelers with flexible dates and locations will have more options. The Personkes once scored a swap in Angers, France, on their preferred dates.

People who live in major cities have more luck requesting specific dates because their locations are in demand, but travelers like the Personkes, who live in a small city outside of Detroit, often need to work harder marketing their homes and communities. The Personkes’ swappers have experienced their town’s local parade and nearby nature trails.

The retirees have swapped as part of People Like Us and HomeLink. They also use the People Like Us Facebook group to speak with other travellers, get advice and suss out exchanges.

They say they love living like locals, getting baguettes from vending machines in remote French towns and joining neighbours for dinner.

“Sometimes we are the first Americans people are ever going to meet, and I want to make a good impression,” Shawn says.

James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.

The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.

Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.

The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.

For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.

But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.

Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.

New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”

Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.

And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”

Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.

“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.

From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.

Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.

Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.

In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.

A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.

“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.

The Patterson family’s basement retreat ‘encapsulates the joy in the things that we love in one room.’ John Cole

Screen-Free ‘Escapes’

“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”

Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.

Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.

“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”

A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.

Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.

Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.

“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.

As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.

“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”

Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.

The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.

When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”

Analog Accessories

Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?

“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.

Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”

More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.

For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.

Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.

Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.

“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.

In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.

Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.

The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.

Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.

The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”