As "Itogi" notes, the tradition of exchanging homes for vacations or holidays has already taken root in the West. Tens of thousands of citizens from different countries around the world annually try on other people's square meters and share their own. Moreover, they can go on adventures not only to far-off lands, but even to a neighboring city. Here, such type of recreation is still perceived as extreme, since domestic tourists have a lot of questions about it.
You give me - I give you
With exchange holidays, as in that joke, the main thing is not to be afraid. Especially since there are dozens of services on the global network that have been offering the service of temporary housing exchange for decades: you register on the site, pay a membership fee from an e-wallet or card (an annual subscription costs from $30 to $150), and go ahead! The most important thing is to properly present your own home: attach as many photos as possible, indicate the number of rooms, sleeping places, bathrooms, specify the distance from the center, the presence of fish that need to be fed, your attitude towards smoking. Then start working on your own wishes. For example, "All my life I dreamed of spending New Year in a nice bungalow in Zambia." However, most users specify as many destinations as possible or simply write "open" (open to all offers) - the wider the geography, the greater the chance of getting a quick response.
You can act on the principle "the best defense is offense" and study ads, sending as many requests as possible. The only requirement is that your requests and those of your potential exchange partner must match. Home exchange can last just a weekend, or it can stretch over several months. For this, special fields are filled in the questionnaire. WX means short-term exchange for weekends, X means regular exchange for vacation time, and LT means long-term stay, which is favored by retirees and students unconstrained by time. By the way, for the latter there is a special symbol XA, meaning that the host has a room on campus. So if the photo shows a nice mansion somewhere in Cambridge, but the exchange type field says XA, you shouldn't count on all two floors, north and south wing. Most likely, it's a college dormitory.
The most interesting part begins when a suitable candidate actually responds to your offer. "There is something of a blind date in all this," explains HomeExchange network vice president George Balen. "But before going on a date with someone from a dating site, you first correspond with them for a long time, look for common ground, try to understand if they are right for you. It's the same here: first there is a long correspondence, and if something about the interlocutor alarms you, you can always refuse. It's normal practice."
In the correspondence, the details of the exchange are discussed - the vacation dates, personal characteristics of the neighbors, payment of phone bills, the presence of pets that need to be looked after. If you can't coordinate the dates, you can use another option. It is designated on websites with the code letters NSX. This means that homes can be exchanged not simultaneously: for example, you go to celebrate Catholic Christmas in the States, and Americans come to our country to see how Orthodox Christmas is celebrated. There are many options - you just need to understand what exactly interests you.
Invited Guests
There are not many exchange stories involving domestic users yet - on the same HomeExchange with tens of thousands of listings, you will find no more than a dozen Russian addresses (there are none at all from Ukraine – Ed.), and the country itself is listed among... exotic ones. In the home exchange service Homelink International, represented in Russia, the count is already in the dozens, but compared to the number of offers from Italy, Spain, and Australia - the leaders in exchanges - it's a drop in the ocean. Even last year's hit "Отпуск по обмену" promising a Christmas love story and a mandatory happy ending along with the house, did not provoke a wave of nomadism. In this case, art turned out to be powerless against prejudices.
Some are sure that owners of mansions in the suburbs of London are unlikely to covet a two-room apartment in the suburbs or even a cottage with all amenities near the capital, others are simply afraid to leave their apartment to strangers, and arranging travel documents on your own is a real hassle. In short, it's not a vacation, but endless extreme. Eduard Kuznetsov from the Russian branch of Homelink International considers the problems far-fetched: "Getting a tourist visa is not difficult if you take care of it in advance, submit documents correctly, and are not a member of Al-Qaeda. Recently, we processed a visa for a young lady to Italy in just five days - that's a record."
Moreover, due to the modest number of Russian listings, demand for domestic participants exceeds supply. Muscovite Liliya Latypova has just returned from a tour of the Apennine Peninsula: 'One married couple from northern Italy wrote to me almost immediately. Besides them, several more residents of Rome said they would be happy to visit Russia.' On her own turf, Liliya has not yet hosted guests – her new Italian friends want to visit Moscow in the summer. Interestingly, foreigners are not even put off by everyday inconveniences. 'In 2003, I hosted tourists from New Zealand,' says Irina Belash, a resident of St. Petersburg. 'An elderly couple stayed in my apartment for just a couple of days, but as luck would have it, the hot water was turned off exactly those two days. Poor things, they had to heat water in pots. They were still satisfied and even thanked me.' Such a friendly attitude towards Russia is understandable – prices for good hotels in St. Petersburg can easily rival world capitals, and here there is tangible savings. By the way, largely because of this, this type of vacation is popular among pensioners in the West – for them it is an opportunity to see the world at minimal cost. They are not afraid to let strangers into their homes either – the contract stipulates that in case of minor damage to property, compensation is provided by the club. It will not exceed a couple of thousand euros, but you can have a carpet on which a guest spilled juice dry-cleaned. Moreover, foreigners' homes are usually insured. Here, widespread insurance of living space is not yet observed, although some insurance companies already offer to protect your home for a short period – from one month.
In a word, one wants to, but it's risky... And yet, there are those who want to feel at home in someone else's house – true, mostly young mobile people who have already seen Europe from the window of a tour bus and then learned to independently plan a route and plan a trip, bypassing travel agencies. Most often, such travelers are not chasing savings (although it is tangible) and can afford to spend a couple of weeks even in Mauritius. For them, exchange vacations are another way to see the country without souvenir-tourist embellishments and rigid guide statements like: 'The bus leaves exactly at one o'clock, we have expensive parking here.' From such trips, they bring back not routine photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, but completely new, deeply personal sensations.
For example, one girl told how an elderly Polish neighbor mistook her for the host's son's fiancée. And how she tried to explain in English that she was just a tourist, but he didn't want to believe her and smiled kindly, inviting her for a cup of tea. And an office manager from St. Petersburg will long remember his morning battle with the gas meter. Even though the English host showed him several times before leaving how to operate the device. A temporary resident of Paris has a different story: on the third day of her stay in the city, the baker began greeting her like the locals who regularly buy baguettes from him. Moreover, for her sake, he condescended to speak English when he realized she was a foreigner.
It turns out that everyday life can also become an attractive tourist product. Especially around New Year, when you always expect changes – at least a change of scenery. And maybe a romantic story will happen. Like in the movies...