Free Lodging as You Explore the World? Mi Casa Es Su Casa
Tips from my book “Let’s Leave the Country! A Guide to Your Family Year Abroad”
I love a great hotel. They offer everything my bedroom usually isn’t: a well-designed, clutter-free room; a freshly made bed with crisp, clean sheets; and a coffee maker an arm’s length away. But hotels aren’t cheap. And imagine what you could do with that money if you didn’t have to spend it on lodging.
Some of that money could even go toward maintaining your home while traveling. Because unless you are a free-as-a-bird nomad with no plants, pets, or yard to care for, a house/pet sitter costs money too.
If there only were a way to get it all — lodging and house-sitting — in one fell swoop. For free.
Well, there is! And that brings us to this “Save It for Someday Tip” from my book:
Experiment with the cost-effective mode of traveling known as home exchange. Not only does this get you comfortable letting another family live in your house someday, but it might also connect you to folks in your someday target country.
Finding the perfect home exchange situation requires more patience and flexibility than searching for a hotel online. At a minimum, mutual timing and desired locations need to align and many questions will come up as you explore concrete options.
However… exchanging homes isn’t for everyone. It requires a level of trust and risk that a lot of people aren’t primed for. (Then so does moving abroad for a year and renting your house to strangers, if that’s part of your plan). But experiencing travel-by-home exchange can be an affordable way to get more comfortable “trusting the universe” as you plan a year abroad.
Several friends of ours swear by the home exchange system, which has allowed them to see quite a bit of the world without paying a penny for lodging. We’ve reaped the rewards too, by staying with them during their home exchanges. We’ve also had the good fortune of meeting a wonderful German family when they did a home exchange in our neighborhood (and who then later hosted us in Berlin).
But alas, when my family signed up with a home exchange site, we didn’t find an ideal situation because we weren’t flexible on location or timing. Had we been willing to live in a town in the southern Czech Republic, the perfect home exchange situation was ours for the grabbing. But we were set on Italy and nothing was going to coax us elsewhere, no matter how charming it might have been.
I share all this to let you know that traveling via home exchange is a viable option worth looking into. There are dozens of active home exchange programs out there as this 2021 article shares. (And for those who aren’t looking to exchange houses but still like the idea of free stays, there’s the world of house-sitting and pet-sitting gigs.) If you decide to go for it, be prepared to spend time sussing out potential opportunities after setting up an enticing visual home profile.
The possibilities will surprise and intrigue you, even though they may not lead to a long-term exchange for a year in another country. But if doing a few home exchanges between now and your “someday” move abroad means you get to sample locations around the world through the home of a local — that’s priceless (literally!).
This post is part of an ongoing series where I share “Save It For Someday Tips” from my book, Let’s Leave the Country! A Guide to Your Family Year Abroad.
And I write about other stuff too:-)
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