Real Homes, Real Neighbourhoods: How Home Exchange Reshaped the Way We Travel

We joined People Like Us thinking it would be a fun way to shake up how we travelled. What we didn't expect was for it to become the way we travel, full stop.

Closer to Home, Just as Meaningful

Some of our favorite exchanges haven't been far flung at all. We've swapped homes in Seattle and Boston more than once, mostly so we could spend time with our kids without the strange formality of a hotel stay. There's something different about waking up in an actual house, making coffee in someone else's kitchen, having space to just be together, rather than meeting up for dinners and goodbyes at a lobby door.

The Bigger Adventures

Then there are the trips that still feel a little unreal when we look back on them. A full month in Costa Rica. Three weeks based in France. Ten days in Amsterdam and a week in Munich. And most recently, several weeks working our way through the UK, with homes in Scotland and Liverpool along the route. I don't think I could begin to pick my top European stay, they were all so amazing in their own ways.

Add it up, and a surprising amount of our travel memories over the past few years trace back to a home exchange.

Living Somewhere, Not Just Passing Through

The thing we keep coming back to is how different it feels to actually live in a place, even briefly. We do our shopping at the local grocer instead of the hotel breakfast buffet. We learn which streets go quiet in the evening and which cafe does a decent coffee. A glass of wine outside listening to the baaing of the sheep next door and the babbling brook nearby can't be beat. A few weeks somewhere starts to feel less like a holiday and more like a version of home, just borrowed for a while. 

The People Make It

None of this works without trust, and that's the part of home exchange we didn't fully appreciate until we were in the middle of it. Handing over your house keys to someone you've mostly only spoken to online, and then being welcomed into theirs, asks something of both sides. We've been lucky with the people we've exchanged with.

Some of our best memories from these trips aren't the sights, they're the exchange partners themselves, the ones who left a bottle of wine on the counter or a handwritten note about the temperamental shower. Even better are the opportunities to meet these new friends in person. Dinners in London and Paris with our Liverpool and Normandy partners, respectively, were the cherries on top of our experiences!

Still Going

Home exchange has let us travel more often, stay longer when we do, and get under the skin of places in a way we probably never would have managed otherwise. Whether it's a weekend hopping over to see the kids or a month somewhere we'd never normally consider, People Like Us has quietly become part of how our family sees the world.

We're already looking at where the next one might be.

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