Grand-Place
The UNESCO-listed market square at the centre of Brussels, three minutes on foot from the apartment.
Most home swap advice is written for people who have never done it. It explains what a swap is, tells you to take good photographs, and stops.
This is about the stage after that, when the things going wrong are no longer the things the beginner guides warned you about. Some of it we got wrong ourselves. Some of it comes from friends who swap their own homes and from the people we have hosted, who are usually happy to tell you what went badly somewhere else. Where other people's accounts contradict each other, we have left the contradiction in rather than pick the tidier version.
Your listing is at its most visible when you know least
The pattern people describe, and it matches what we saw, is that a new listing gets shown a lot for the first few months and then quietly settles down.
Which means the period when you have the least idea what you are doing is the period when the most people are looking at you. We published ours before it was really finished, thinking we would tidy it up as we went. That is the one thing we would do differently. Finish it, then publish it.
If your listing has been up a while and has gone quiet, that is not necessarily a sign that anything is wrong.
Being easy to find is not the same as being chosen
Search matches on the official address of your home, and how much that helps depends entirely on where you are.
Friends of ours live about an hour outside a major city, in a town whose name you would not recognise. Their house is lovely and it barely comes up, because a listing in a nearby town does not appear when someone searches the city and there is no regional result to fall back on.
Our apartment has the opposite problem. It is in Brussels 1000, a few minutes from the Grand-Place, so it appears in the obvious search along with every other central listing. Being findable and being chosen are different things, and a good address only solves the first.
Both problems have the same answer, which is to stop waiting to be found:
- Reverse search is the feature we wish we had understood a year earlier. The filter reads "View members who are interested in coming to", and it shows you people who have already named your city as somewhere they want to go. Instead of competing for attention, you are writing to people who have said they want to come to you. It works best city by city and less well for whole regions.
- The official Facebook groups. There is an open one, "All About HomeExchange", and members-only groups in English, French and Spanish. You request access and they let people in periodically. Several people we have swapped with say this is where their exchanges actually come from, because a post can explain where you are in a way a map pin cannot.
Put your rules where people see them before they commit
This is the cheapest mistake to avoid and we still nearly made it.
Someone we know assumed that leaving the "Smokers Welcome" box unticked was enough. Their guest found the no-smoking rule in the house manual the day before arriving and was annoyed about it. Nobody had behaved badly. The rule had simply turned up at the wrong moment.
Anything that could make someone pull out has to be visible before they commit, which means on the listing itself, rather than in the manual you send afterwards. You are allowed to set terms. Rules about children, pets, parties and smoking are completely ordinary, and a request that does not feel right is one you can decline without explaining yourself.
Write the manual for someone who has never been in your home
Ours started as one page and grew every time something went slightly wrong. The useful parts are all things that seemed too obvious to write down.
Things we have heard about, from friends and from guests telling us about previous stays:
- A guest who kept trying to leave the building through a neighbour's front door, because nothing said which door was which.
- A guest who reactivated the owner's Netflix subscription, which then billed the owner's card.
- A guest who set the thermostat fan to run continuously, which turned up on the electricity bill.
- A guest who arrived with a bicycle and nowhere to put it.
None of those are bad guests. They are all gaps in a document.
Worth covering: how to get in, which door is which, where the bins go and on what day, how the heating actually works, the wifi, and who to ring when something breaks. If you are swapping between Europe and North America, the appliances are different enough to need explaining. The tumble dryer comes up more than anything else.
Our own manual grew fastest in the first year, one line at a time, each one added the day after somebody had to ask us a question we should have answered in advance.
Cleaning is where it actually goes wrong
Everything else here is a detail. This is the one that causes bad feeling, and it is worth being blunt about why: two people can both be acting in complete good faith and still be a long way apart on what "clean" means.
The stories run both ways. People arrive to homes that are genuinely dirty. Owners come back to broken crockery and bathrooms in a state. But the case that taught us the most is the one in between: someone we know paid for a professional cleaner, left what they believed was a clean house, and were then told their hosts had spent four hours cleaning after them, including the garden. They were upset, and fairly so. Spending the last day of a holiday scrubbing is nobody's idea of a holiday.
Nobody in that story did anything wrong. They had different standards and never compared them.
Two things help, and neither is a rule about cleanliness:
Say what state you expect, in words you could tick off. "Left clean" means nothing. "Beds stripped, dishwasher run and emptied, bins out, floors vacuumed" is checkable, and it also tells the other person what you are not asking for.
Treat a cleaning fee as information about standards. Some hosts avoid swapping with people who charge one, reasoning that someone used to paying for cleaning may expect a hotel result and may not clean well themselves. We think that is too broad, and plenty of people we would happily swap with charge a fee. But it does tell you the conversation about standards has not happened yet.
What a cancellation actually costs
This is the failure with the worst consequences, because by the time it happens you have usually bought flights.
One account we have heard more than once in outline: a swap cancelled ten days before travel, because one half of a couple accepted the exchange while the other accepted a paid booking elsewhere for the same dates. The platform put in 120 a night towards a hotel costing 200, confirmed it only the day before departure, and the alternatives it offered were not comparable.
What people do about it:
- Ask the other side to check their calendar against any other platform they list on before you confirm. That double booking was not malice. It was two people and two calendars.
- If you are cancelled on, contact the platform straight away and start writing to other hosts yourself at the same time. The platform will make its own approaches, but there is a lag and it may approach places you would not want. Someone we know found a better replacement inside 48 hours by doing both at once.
- Expect any compensation to be capped below what you actually spend, and to be confirmed late.
One host who had been cancelled on five times stopped returning GuestPoints for cancelled point stays at their home. Whether or not you go that far, the principle holds: cancelling costs the other side real money, and the platform's protection does not cover all of it.
The requests we have learned to read
What we look at now, before replying:
Whether it was written for us. Wrong name, wrong city, or enthusiasm about a home that is not ours. Someone praising our charming studio has not looked at a two-bedroom apartment.
Point requests from people who never host. No hosting reviews, and no availability on their own calendar. That combination usually means someone after cheap accommodation with no intention of hosting anyone. A request that also offers a reciprocal reads completely differently.
How they review other people. This is the least obvious check and the most useful. You can open a previous partner's profile and read the review your prospective guest left them. Someone we know found a person who had given three stars with no explanation about ten times in a row, and declined. It is tedious and it works.
Response rate. A very low one tells you what the conversation will be like.
Against all of that: everybody was new once. We were. Someone who has passed the platform's checks and writes like a human being is worth taking a chance on. Being new is not a warning sign. Being careless is.
Whether this is easy depends on your address
Two accounts sit side by side and both are probably true.
Some people say a personal message naming the host, explaining who you are and why you are coming, and confirming you accept the house rules, almost always gets an exchange within a few attempts. Others describe writing to dozens of homes, hearing nothing back, and being refused even where the calendar showed free dates.
Personal messages genuinely do work better than templates. But a warm country in winter, or more or less anywhere in Europe in August, is competitive in a way that no amount of good writing fixes. If you are struggling for a popular place in peak season, your message is probably not the problem.
Worth knowing: calendars are often out of date, and an open calendar is not a confirmation.
The part that is not a technique
Two things matter more than any of the above.
The first is that this is not a rental. You are living in someone's home among their things, and the whole arrangement depends on that being understood on both sides.
The second is that not everyone wants a friendship. Some people want to meet you, hand over the keys in person and stay in touch afterwards. Others want a clean handover and to be left alone. Working out which one you are dealing with, and not managing someone who wants space, is most of the difference between a smooth swap and a tiring one.
The small things still count. A note, something local in the kitchen, a short list of where to eat nearby. They cost almost nothing and they are what people mention afterwards.
One last thing before you say yes
Look at the address on Google Street View. It takes a minute, it is not rude, and it tells you things that photographs are chosen not to.
Mentioned in this guide