House Swapping : Tourists Trade Their Homes for Castles Around the World

Strangers living in your neighbors’ house? Using their things? Driving their cars? Don’t sound the alarms just yet. Chances are your neighbors are living in the strangers’ house, using their things and driving their car.

It’s called house swapping or home exchange, and it’s emerging as the most civilized way to have a low budget vacation anywhere in the world. Europeans have been doing it for years, and now Americans are warming up to the idea of vacationing rent-free in a thatched English cottage, a French country villa or a rooftop apartment in the heart of Rome.

The idea is simple enough. Family A wants to vacation where Family B lives; Family B wants to vacation where Family A lives. They match up through a home exchange service, coordinate travel dates, leave their keys with the neighbors and a list of “must-knows” on the kitchen table and off they go to each other’s homes.

Sounds great, you say, except for the part about letting perfect strangers have the run of your home and your possessions. Exchange fans--and there are plenty in Orange County--insist that those qualms soon disappear as you get to know your exchange family through correspondence. People who exchange, they say, are the nicest people in the world. And besides, they add, since you are living in their home, you have each other by the throat.

When Sharon and Harold Whatley of Santa Ana decided to try home exchange two years ago, Sharon admits, her initial feelings were of trepidation. “But I was at the point where I wanted to recarpet my house anyway and do a few other things,” she says, “so some of the things I might have worried about I didn’t have to worry about.”

Having done it once, she says, she would recommend the experience without reservations.

“By the time you actually do it, you’ve written back and forth a lot, you’ve exchanged pictures and you’ve talked on the phone once or twice, so you feel you really know these people and you truly have a good feeling about leaving your house in their care.”

During their two-month European odyssey, the Whatleys swapped houses with families in both England and France. The English couple with whom they exchanged got on so famously with the Whatleys’ next-door neighbors that they took several trips with them during their 3-week visit. The Whatleys, meanwhile, became such good friends with their English neighbors, with whom they shared a passion for gardening, that they hosted them in their home last May.

Two weeks later they welcomed their French exchange partner, Giselle Hyvelde, who had not only left them her flat in Paris but had also given them free access to her country home in Limoges. They have since been invited to go skiing with their former French neighbors as guests in their Alpine chalet.

“You really make friends all round the world,” says Whatley. “We’ve had invitations from just about everywhere from people who saw our listing. We had one fabulous offer from the island of Majorca. You just don’t have enough time in one lifetime to take advantage of them all.”

Listings in exchange directories can cram an extraordinary amount of information about someone’s home into two or three lines by using what at first glance looks like undecipherable code. But a little practice with the key soon reveals that “R Poitiers 12M” means a rural setting near Poitiers, France, 12 miles from the mountains, and “A as ae cc dk mo uz” means that the 1-story house comes with air conditioning, use of a car, country club privileges, a photographic darkroom, a microwave oven and a view. Many of the listings also include a black-and-white photograph.

Subscribers to such directories pay a fee to have their listing included, or for a smaller fee they can simply buy the directory and use it to track down desirable exchanges. Vacation Exchange Club, based in Youngtown, Ariz., publishes two directories a year with about 6,000 listings of houses and apartments for exchange. The cost for both directories is $16 with an additional fee of $8.75 if you wish to list your home in one of them.

Intervac, whose offices are located in Tiburon near San Francisco, publishes three annual directories with about 7,500 listings in 30 countries. Subscribers pay $35 for the three, whether they choose to list or not.

Would-be exchangers in Orange County usually have little trouble finding a match. With its appealing climate and coastal location, its proximity to world-famous tourist attractions like Disneyland, and the fact that exchange houses here invariably come with a car, Orange County is becoming an increasingly popular exchange destination, especially for Europeans.

The companies that publish these directories stress that they are strictly a listing service and that since subscribers make all their own arrangements they are not responsible for the homes listed nor for any problems that may arise during an exchange. “But for the most part, if you have taken a few sensible precautions, problems are rare,” says Lori Horne, one of the two principals of Intervac. Horne, a 10-year exchange veteran, is taking her family to Italy on a home exchange this month.

Most homeowner and auto insurance policies remain in effect during an exchange, so would-be exchangers should ensure that their policies are up to date and that home and car exchange is not excluded under the provisions of their particular policies. They should also leave clear instructions about unusual appliances, hard-to-locate switches and temperamental plants and put away anything too valuable to risk being broken.

Damage, however, is very rare and theft is almost unheard of. Most exchangers admit to bending over backwards to care for the homes they borrow; indeed, it is not unusual for the homeowner to return and find some long-neglected repairs have been made by a handy exchange partner.

The biggest problem, in fact, relates to cancellations. If one exchange partner cancels, a family can find itself stranded at peak season with non-refundable airline tickets and no hotel reservations, a situation rarely covered by trip cancellation insurance.

Surprisingly, the basis of most home exchanges is the gentleman’s agreement. Contracts, even formal written agreements, are rare. “They’re just not a good idea,” says Intervac’s Horne. “You end up talking more about the contract than trusting each other and talking about what you’re going to be doing.”

Even first-timers are surprised at how quickly trust--even kinship--develops between exchange partners as they plan their future arrangements by letter, by phone and even by video cassette.

Apart from the cost of airline tickets, an exchanger’s only investment is the directory listing and perhaps a few international phone calls. Once installed in their new digs, exchangers need only budget for normal day-to-day living expenses, especially if they have the use of a car during their stay.

This can be a boon for families with children, who often find that the high cost of hotels and restaurant meals coupled with peak season air fares simply puts family vacations out of their reach.

Not all exchangers are families, though.

In Europe in particular, highly educated professional couples with a yen for travel are among the most avid home-exchangers, especially teachers and university professors who have long vacations, limited economic means and unbounded intellectual and cultural curiosity.

It is this thirst for a different kind of travel experience, a desire to get to know a culture better by living it, that is at the heart of many home exchanges.

“We wanted more than just the old tourist route,” Whatley says. “When you stay in hotels, you just don’t meet anyone. We wanted to know what it would be like to live in an English family’s home. We wanted to see how they did their laundry, what they cooked, what their neighbors were like, what their neighborhoods were like. And it was the same when we went to France.”

Leland Estes of Tustin calls it a better way of visiting a foreign country. A European historian with a doctorate degree, Estes received a two-month grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities three years ago to research documents in the archives of the British Museum. Since it was difficult to find a single home exchange in London for the full two months, he coordinated two consecutive home exchanges for his family instead.

“You get an entirely different sense of a country during an exchange,” he says. “Take shopping, for instance. You don’t normally shop for groceries when you tour abroad. We had to go to small English stores with their odd business hours, and we could only buy one day’s worth of groceries at a time because the ice boxes were so small.”

What makes exchanging so wonderful, he says, is “the little things that happen that you would normally miss out on if you hadn’t made arrangements of this sort.”

The Estes family’s first exchange stop was in the home of local actress Judy Bowker and her husband. “We ended up visiting her parents in New Forest,” he says. Through the second exchange couple, two professors from the North London Polytechnic, they were introduced to the local member of Parliament, who took the Esteses on a personal tour of the House of Commons.

Although he has only exchanged once, Estes remains a confirmed exchange-ophile. He admits that his beloved garden was not exactly in the shape he hoped it would be when he returned, but points out that it would have been in no shape at all had it been abandoned for two months. “All in all, you would rather have somebody in the house than not,” he says.

Even the experience of having the exchange family’s radio stolen out of their car did not dampen his enthusiasm. After reporting the matter to the local police, he phoned his exchange counterparts with the bad news. Their reaction? “Just tell our insurance man, and we’ll take care of it when we get home.”

Home exchange is not for everyone. “I don’t recommend it for people seeing a country for the first time,” notes Carolyn Wood of Newport Beach, who will embark on her fourth exchange with husband Thomas this fall. “At first you have to savor a little of everything. I’m not sure that it would have worked for us when we were younger.”

Unabashed Anglophiles, the Woods have totted up stays in a 16th-Century home in West Sussex, a tiny hamlet of 500 souls in Suffolk, and a condominium overlooking St. Andrews Golf Course near Edinburgh. This year’s trip, to the Welsh Marshes, was arranged through friends they met two exchanges ago.

Carolyn Wood calls the modern notion of travel a recipe for physical exhaustion. “Traveling from hotel to hotel is very tedious,” she says. “Not only is it a lot of work to pack and unpack every two days, but you end up living like street urchins. All you can do is press your nose up against the windows of those beautiful bakeries and wonder what it would be like to shop there.”

Home exchangers know.