Trading Mansions Sounds Like a Dream. It’s Also a More Sustainable Way to Travel.

For many, the idea of doing a home exchange is enticing: The thrill of a new destination, calling an inspired new space home away from home, living like a local for a little while. But what happens if you have a sprawling estate on the ocean to offer yet can’t find a property swap that comes close to the size and luxury of your own?

Enter: HomeExchange Collection, a division of Paris-based HomeExchange, a 30-year-old home-swapping company with over 100,000 residences across 133 countries and teams in Zagreb, Croatia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The new division launched last year and focuses solely on luxury property trades.

“Some of our members were over flooded with requests from people who wanted to exchange homes, yet their houses just weren’t as nice,” the company’s co-founder Emmanuel Arnaud says. “That’s why we decided to launch HomeExchange Collection, to better cater to the needs of clients with super-luxurious homes. It’s a space where they can meet other like-minded travellers who want to exchange their little piece of paradise they’ve built all around the world,” Arnaud says.

THE ITEM

HomeExchange Collection is an uber-exclusive community of home (and yacht and farm and castle) owners. And the criteria for membership is stringent. Homes are required to be valued at US$1.5 million or more, though US$2 million to US$10 million is typical.

“Location is a big part of it as well as amenities,” Arnaud says. “For example, if your house doesn’t have a pool in a prime sunny location, it’s going to be harder to make the cut.”

The houses themselves are anything but ordinary. Many come with five-star amenities such as boats, tennis courts, gyms, notable artworks, pools, daily housekeeping, and private chefs. Some of the most luxurious offerings include a 6,700-square-foot mansion in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with a full-time gardener, chef, maid, and part-time massage therapist; a penthouse in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighbourhood with a 750-square-foot terrace; a coffee farm in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and a hillside villa in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a60-foot solar-heated lap pool and hot tub on the terrace.

A home in Chiang Mai Thailand
Courtesy of HomeExchange Collection

Exchanges needn’t be reciprocal or immediate, either. If a member lends their home without reciprocity, they get GuestPoints to bank for a stay somewhere else at another time.

Members of the HomeExchange Collection can lend their homes to each other for a weekend, week, or month—and all include the benefit of their host’s insider intel. Other perks include a 100% flexible cancellation policy for guests, up to US$2 million in property damage protection, and access to the member service team 24/7.

PRICE

If your home is selected, an annual membership to HomeExchange Collection costs US$1,000, which gives members the opportunity for unlimited exchanges during the calendar year.

DESCRIPTION

With over 4,000 luxury homes in over 70 countries across the globe, from France and Italy to Thailand, Australia, and the U.A.E., even the most affluent are reconsidering the way they vacation. “Covid has invited everyone to rethink being in shared, public spaces, and instead having a whole place to themselves,” Arnaud says.

It’s a shift happening, in part, Arnaud says, because of growing environmental awareness.

“People are rethinking their relationship to consumption,” he says. “The idea that you have this very, very nice home sitting idle while you’re paying to be at a hotel sounds a bit absurd. Why not use these homes which would otherwise be empty?”

WHAT’S THE GOOD?

As a certified B Corp, HomeExchange Collection meets high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability—and it’s the definition of responsible tourism. By nature, the concept of home exchanging is a more sustainable way to travel. By using pre-existing accommodations and encouraging people to live like locals, the local ecosystem remains undisturbed.

“We think our approach makes better use of the existing infrastructure, the existing homes, rather than building new homes and hotels,” Arnaud says.

The company takes its commitment to the environment one step further by calculating its carbon footprint every year, trying to reduce it, and contributing to global carbon neutrality by investing in social and environmental projects.

Meanwhile, members, through HomeExchange’s Solidarity group, can open their homes to relief workers or affected members in instances such as pandemics, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, or war.

“It started with Covid when we realized we had a lot of homes available and a lot of people who wanted to help. We launched the Solidarity program to help frontline workers in hospitals to be able to have a place where they could stay without having to commute back and forth,” Arnaud says. The program was then expanded to house Ukrainian refugees.

WHAT’S NEXT

Aside from continuing to grow membership and properties worldwide, Arnaud’s mission is for everyone to have the opportunity to go on vacation. The company has already partnered with an organisation in France, Le Secours Catholique, which helps low-income families travel.

“We want to be able to help people go on a vacation, no matter who they are, and we are looking for the right kind of partners and the right kind of ways to put that into place on a wider scale,” Arnaud says.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.