The people swapping their homes with strangers instead of using hotels or Airbnbs

A home swap property in the popular desert city of Palm Springs, California. (Daniel Morando/Courtesy Kindred via CNN Newsource)

Lauren Shaw loves to travel. But putting her own place up for rent? No way.

“I’ve never felt comfortable listing our apartment on a rental platform,” she says. “I’ve had friends who have had horrible experiences with guests and little to no support from the booking platform support team.”

Then there’s the cost. Shaw, from New York, loves to ski, a notoriously pricey pursuit and one which has seen accommodation costs skyrocket with the boom in short-term rentals over the past decade.

“Ski lodging is often very expensive and cost prohibitive,” she says.

Instead, Shaw and her partner turned to home swapping in order to make their travel dreams come true.

“We love to travel and this has opened up our ability to do so even more often, as accommodation is often the most expensive part of a trip,” she says. “Because you have to also let people stay in your home to stay in someone else’s, there is more accountability to treat the space as you would want someone to treat yours.”

A new way of doing business

Shaw is a member of Kindred, one of a number of home-swapping platforms that allow users to travel the world for less. As well as helping cut costs, such services are also a way of easing ongoing concerns around overtourism and rising rents forcing local people out of their communities.

“Over 90% of our homes are the real primary residences of the hosting member, and most of the year it’s where they live,” explains Justine Palefsky, co-founder of Kindred. “Members are exchanging nights and not dollars, so there’s no way to purchase or sell nights on Kindred for cash.”

Kindred launched in 2022 and now has 75,000 members across 150 cities in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Western Europe. Instead of paying a membership fee, Kindred is free to sign up to.

“Hosts do not earn revenue by hosting, they just earn the ability to stay in somebody else’s home at another time.”

Users only pay a fee of between $15 and $35 per night to the company itself when staying in someone else’s home, as well as covering cleaning costs at the end of their stay. Palefsky says this works out as around a tenth of the cost of a short-term rental.

The impact of short-term rentals on local communities is something she is acutely aware of.

“What was really important was to design a system that had a more conscious impact on our cities. I grew up in San Francisco, a very high-cost city, looking around saying, ‘Wow, how am I going to be able to afford the same kind of life my parents had?’”

This is a concern being played out in cities around the world. Airbnb, in particular, has come under increasing fire and regulatory pressure as city leaders look to end punishingly high rents driven by apartments being used for tourists, not locals. Then there are the changes to a place’s fabric that short-term rentals bring, pushing out small businesses that many visitors don’t feel the need to use.

Since November 2023, New York City’s Local Law 18 has forbidden Airbnb users from renting out their entire apartment. Those that do use the service can only rent out spaces while they too are present, while also having to register with the city. Those that don’t expect to pay thousands of dollars in fines.

Meanwhile, Barcelona is planning to completely outlaw short-term rentals by 2028 in the wake of street protests about tourism overcrowding and a backlash against those using such services.

‘Everything can be shared’

Beyond money and issues surrounding the tourist economy, home-swapping also has a higher-minded idea of what it means to travel.

“Airbnb’s initial promise was that everything can be rented, even your most precious asset,” says Emmanuel Arnaud, CEO of HomeExchange. HomeExchange has been around for over 30 years, initially as a catalog business before moving online. Today it has over 200,000 members across 150 countries. In the past three years alone it has seen 50% growth per year, with more than 460,000 exchanges in 2024. Chances are you’ll be aware of it thanks to movie “The Holiday,” in which Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet trade their homes and lives and find love along the way.

“Our promise is the reverse: Everything can be shared. There’s another world that’s possible, that’s not necessarily monetary. Even your most important financial and intimate asset, your home, can be shared. And if we all share it, then we can unlock amazing travel possibilities.”

Home Exchange works slightly differently to Kindred. Users pay a flat $220 per year for as many exchanges as they want. The principle, however, is much the same: that travel can be more affordable and create deeper connections if we look beyond the idea of simply making money out of our homes.

“By removing that exchange of where one is paying the other, the relationship between two members feels really different. It’s much more of two peers who have both contributed something, who connect as humans in advance of their stay and decide to trust one another,” says Palefsky.

“I have spent much of my career in tech and have left with a hunger for a bit more substance and to use technology to actually connect people to the world, to help them connect with each other and to help create more rich human relationships,” she adds.

An answer to overtourism?

Of course, users do need to do a lot more work themselves, including connecting with potential exchangers over video call and ensuring that they are the right fit. The benefit, though, is a deeper and richer experience for everyone.

“Meeting people who genuinely want to share their space and make others feel welcome is refreshing. That spirit of generosity and connection resonates with me,” says New York-based storyteller and comedian Esmond Fountain.

Fountain says he even went to a Kindred users meetup and wound up using the service to take his first ever overseas trip, to London, with a friend he had made at the event.

“It’s not just about affordable travel; the sense of community has made such a difference in my life,” he says.

Barbara, a HomeExchange user who chose not to share her surname for reasons of privacy, echoes Fountain’s words.

“My life has been greatly enhanced by house-exchanging. I have friends across the globe. I have visited places I never thought possible and I have learned how real people live.”

While these personal tales suggest there is a growing niche for those craving human connection, its larger attraction for policy makers, if not hotel owners and property developers, is that home swapping has the potential to change tourism for the better.

“If 100% of the people who are doing short-term rentals were doing home exchange instead, there wouldn’t be overtourism, because the number of units available is the number of units of people who live there,” says Arnaud. “So if there’s enough people living there, then we’re not adding new people. It’s not growing the total population.”

For cities like Barcelona and New York, such a change could be the way to solve what has long felt like an intractable problem.

Article written by Joe Minihane, CNN