Home Exchange: England : Trading Places : Here’s a primer on how to exchange homes and save a bunch of money in the process

Many of the people I talked to before we went to England last July were frankly envious when they heard we were going to be trading homes. “How did you arrange that?” they asked. When I told them how, they looked skeptical. It sounded too easy.

But home exchanges are easy. They do, however, take planning. A lot of planning. If you begin immediately you could even be ready to step into someone’s home for a month’s stay in Europe next summer.

We’ve exchanged homes three times with families in England and my wife and I are convinced it’s the least expensive and best way for us to travel in a foreign country.

How do you go about it? There are at least three ways. You can set up your own exchange, as we have done; you can advertise in the newspaper in the area where you want to exchange or you can join the many organizations that exist to help you find the right location and family.

In addition to being able to walk away from your home, your pets and your garden for a month or longer--without undue worry and without making a big production out of leaving--exchanging your home with someone from another country is one of the cheapest ways we have found to spend an extended period of time in the country of your choice.

I figure we spent about $1,300 each for our month in England, including round-trip air fare from the West Coast to London’s Heathrow. College students grubbing through Europe on Spam and beer may be able to beat that price, but if you have a family or you feel you’re too old to sleep in a tent in the rain and you like some of the nicer things in life, you’ll have a hard time beating this price. And since the air fare was the major cost, we could have stayed for two or three months for very little more.

In return for our efforts, for one month my wife and I lived in a four-bedroom, two-story 18th-Century stone house on the outskirts of Bath in southwestern England. We bought groceries from the man in the multipurpose post office, grocery and drug store down the street; I mowed the lawn and Alice worked in the garden; we were invited to dinner by the friends of our exchange family and we entertained friends and family who came for weekends or longer to visit us.

*

We even had a cat, who replaced the cats we left at our home in the Santa Cruz area. In short, we lived very normal, settled lives in England, not unlike the lives we live here. With one major difference. During the days we climbed into our Ford Escort and had easy access to most of southern England and Wales. It sure beat the typical tourist life, living out of suitcases, eating every meal in a restaurant and not meeting anyone who wasn’t associated with the tourist industry. On top of that, we weren’t spending $100 a day on hotels and $50-$75 a day on restaurant food.

The breakdown of costs for each of the two of us went something like this: Air fare from the West Coast to London’s Heathrow Airport, on a regularly scheduled flight cost $700 per person. Twenty-five noon meals eaten in pubs at $15 each: $375 per person. Groceries for breakfasts and evening light meals at home amounted to approximately $75 each. Gasoline for our travels around the English countryside (which cost more than $3 per gallon) was another $60 per person. Then there were the all important snacks and clotted cream teas we had each afternoon; another $60 for each of us.

Some of these expenses were less because two of us were sharing the costs (for example, gasoline costs) but it’s easy to see that trading homes is a whole lot more economical than renting rooms, cars and eating every meal in a restaurant.

It could have been even cheaper if we had eaten more meals at home and restrained our taste for mid-afternoon snacks. We could have also traveled less, but that seems counter to the purpose of a visit abroad.

We had grown tired of group travel with, say, 40 to 60 Americans who sweep into a foreign city, take a one-hour tour and sweep out again to visit another city, going by bus and eating in giant restaurants designed for tour groups. We didn’t participate in the culture; we just looked.

Conversely, a home exchange makes it easy to see the sights while maintaining a home and gaining insight into the lifestyles of the people in the country you are visiting.

By staying in Bath we were able to experience a city of stately beauty and a wonderful past, with origins 2,000 years ago when the hot mineral sites attracted the Romans, who founded the town. Edgar, the first king of all England, was crowned in Bath in AD 973. The Georgians arrived 250 years ago and created much of the architecture in the city, modeling it after ancient Rome and building it with a wonderful, yellow stone that glows in the early evening light. It became a resort for English society during the 1700s and 1800s and today is a fashionable city with universities, gardens, museums and an excellent theater.

*

My wife and I chose Bath because it is so attractive and because it put us at the doorstep of the Cotswolds--one of the most beautiful areas in all of England.

The Cotswolds covers much of the southwest and center of England. It gained prosperity during the 15th and 16th centuries as a wool producing center but when the Industrial Revolution brought a decline in the woolen industry, the villages were largely deserted as residents sought work elsewhere. During the last century, the thatched and slate-roofed towns, with flower boxes under every window, became fashionable places to live again. They also grew wealthy from tourism. In some collective sense they represent an idealized England . . . an England long gone.

Although now inhabited, the villages are more like beautiful, living museums. For us, living in Bath meant having easy access to the Cotswolds. We could go to any Cotswold village in the morning and, following a day of walking and photographing, visiting museums and churches, talking to people we met on the street and in shops and, of course, after a spot of afternoon tea, we’d be home by evening.

We planned for almost a year before we were able to go to Bath this summer.

There are many ways to organize a home exchange. We did it the way we’ve done it before, by making inquiries with friends who travel a lot. They provided the name of someone they knew in the Bath area--a woman with grown children who wanted a sunny California vacation. That isn’t the only way. It may not even be the best way.

And so the exchange was born. We told our prospective exchange family about this area of California. We “sold” her on the idea of exchanging homes with us. I think it was essential that we convinced her that we are trustworthy and responsible people. After all, we were proposing that we look closely at each other’s books, cupboards and life-style. It’s a kind of invasion some people couldn’t accept. That makes it important to start the home exchange process early; be friendly and frank about what you want and who you are.

So we told her about ourselves. We told her we had exchanged homes with English families twice before and that we were prepared to offer references. We sent her pictures of our home and she sent us pictures of hers. In the course of our letter-writing we told her we wanted nonsmokers and we felt that trading cars was important.

We put everything in writing. It’s probably not a good idea to make too many of the arrangements over the phone, because it is important to have records, should anything go sour (this has never happened to us). Tell the prospective exchange family how many people will be staying in their house, what chores you expect them to do at your home--lawn maintenance, collecting mail, etc. Include the exact dates of the exchange and the kind of car they will be driving (automatic or stick shift, year, condition). They will supply you with the same information. (Be as prepared for the English roads as possible.)

*

A significant savings occurs in the exchange of each other’s cars. Being able to go to a village or a place without relying on public transportation is vital; it not only allows you to stop when you see something interesting, it saves you time because you don’t have to rely on public transportation. Exchanging cars is essential for the family coming to California, of course; our public transportation is too poor in most places to expect a visiting family to use it for exploring.

Exchanging cars requires some care. We’ve never had a car accident in England, but you need to be fully prepared (read: insured). Our U.S. insurance company (California Automobile Association of America) told us that if the exchange were going to be longer than a month, we would need to put the other driver(s) on our policy. Since our exchange was slightly less than a month, we simply supplied them with the age of the driver, her driving record and her driver’s license number. Insurance companies in Great Britain show some reluctance to insure U.S. drivers, but our host family has always been able to work it out for us. (This summer’s host told us that her insurance company feared what it perceived as Americans’ penchant for suing.)

Finally, we worked out an informal agreement between both participating families that we would either pay someone to clean our respective homes before we returned it to them or we would clean them thoroughly ourselves. No one wants to come home suffering from jet-lag and have to clean up someone else’s dirt before unpacking. We’ve always come home to a spotlessly clean house and there’s never been any serious breakage.

If we have things in our home we can’t stand having broken, we feel better if we pack them up and store them. If there are things we don’t want them to use, we leave the exchanging family notes to that effect. We also clear out some shelves and dresser drawers for their clothes and then we are ready to walk away.

Last summer we met our exchanging family in person before exchanging, but on the other two occasions we have been content with phone calls and letters. We met our exchanging family this time because we agreed to pick them up at San Francisco airport and drive them to our house the night before we had to leave for England. Meeting them this time gave us a chance to establish a rapport, show them which remote control devices did what and how to operate the washer and dryer.

We left them instructions and names of people they could call if there were problems: electrical, plumbing or medical. They did the same for us. We alerted our neighbors and friends that we were exchanging, and in each case they have shown our visiting English families good American hospitality while we were away.

*

Don’t avoid telling them the problems. Don’t make your house sound better than it is. (Our house sits on a hillside and we have a lot of stairs both inside and outside the house. This kept one prospect, who had a physical disability, from accepting the exchange offer. It would have created a lot of problems for us and a lot of ill-will if we had not told them about the stairs early on in our communication.)

The benefits of this kind of travel are enormous. You find yourself--at least briefly--a part of another culture. You take their newspapers, you watch their television, you talk to the neighbors and storekeepers. And if the exchange is successful, you make important friends of the exchange family--people who have met your friends, looked into your own life and shared your home.

But a successful exchange can only occur when you give the planning stage plenty of time. It’s not too soon to begin planning for next summer.

GUIDEBOOK

Where to Shop for a Swap

Arranging exchanges: Although I have never exchanged a home through an agency, here are the names of two well-known U.S. companies:

Intervac U.S./International Home Exchange, 30 Corte San Fernando, Tiburon, Calif. 94920; 9,000 listings in 36 countries, specializing in England, France and the United States; $62 per year includes one catalogue, plus a listing; tel. (800) 756-HOME or (415) 435-3497.

Vacation Exchange Club, P.O. Box 650, Key West, Fla. 33041; 6,000 listings per catalogue, specializing in Europe, North America and the Caribbean; $60 per year includes three catalogues plus a listing in one; tel. (800) 638-3841.