After using the Love Home Swap home exchange network for a year and a half I was excited to have the opportunity to pose some interview questions to Debbie Wosskow, founder of this home exchange network. Love Home Swap has been pretty successful for my house swapping travel needs (one of the three sites I use), though I know there are a number of critics in the home exchange community who don’t like their approach. Love Home Swap offers both points-based and simultaneous exchanges and has some innovative and market leading features (you can read my complete review here).
Debbie Wosskow’s leadership of Love Home Swap isn’t her only involvement in peer-to-peer services, she has also been very active in the UK sharing economy community. My interview, below, provides some insights from Debbie on both the direction of Love Home Swap and the role the sharing economy will play in people’s lives and travel in the future.
ShareTraveler: What inspired you to found Love Home Swap rather than just joining one of the many existing home exchange networks in 2010?
Debbie Wosskow: What struck me at the time was that the sector was ripe for innovation. Many of the sites that were around back then looked quite dated, they didn’t have a great user experience and there wasn’t really a brand behind them.
With Love Home Swap we wanted to create a brand and an experience that was more like booking a boutique hotel. We also wanted to make more use of popular technologies that other sites weren’t making the most of, like Facebook Connect – ultimately we were looking to create something a little more stylish than the existing sites at the time.
ST: Love Home Swap offers both simultaneous exchanges and swap points, can you tell me why you decided to launch the swap points option?
Debbie: The biggest barrier to home swapping is if the other person doesn’t want to stay where you are – because even if you don’t have the right dates, often un-simultaneous swaps are an option that works really well. Swap Points is our way of tackling this challenge and making home swapping more flexible.
ST: Your business has been focused on growth and innovation, including acquisitions, insurance options for members, and swap points. Can you give my readers any clues about upcoming innovations we can look forward to?
Debbie: I can’t say too much, but as we grow out our team we’re working more and more on our user-experience and making the site work better for our members, both technically and as a social club.
We were really excited to launch our Swap Protection pack recently and are the first site to offer this kind of package. We’re also now working with a host of other companies like Made.com and Zipcar to offer exclusive benefits that we know our members will enjoy – there will be lots more of these perks to come.
We’re also taking a look into our Swap Points system and working with our members to improve how it works. We’re making some really exciting strides here, so watch this space.
ST: Prior to Love Home Swap your business ventures were not related to the sharing economy. But after founding LHS you created the trade body Sharing Economy UK and wrote a report on the sharing economy for the government. What led to your passion around collaborative consumption?
Debbie: I speak a lot in the UK about the disruptive nature of the sharing economy and how much it’s changing the role of business in society today, which is what really attracted me to this sector.
The sharing economy, particularly for women, is transforming the way we see work and creating new paths for forging careers that are much more adaptable and flexible. We’re seeing a new generation of micro-entrepreneurs come through, who can use their assets and skills to make and save money on their own terms, which is incredibly exciting. I’ve always been around women who’ve worked for themselves, so running a business seemed like the done thing. But it isn’t like this for everyone – so it’s exciting to work in an industry that really champions this.
If you look at millennials, this sharing culture is engrained within them. Access is prized over ownership, so the sharing economy is really at the forefront of change and will be a huge influence on the way businesses operate in future.
ST: Do you use other sharing economy services when traveling (i.e. ridesharing, peer to peer tours and meals, crowdsourced delivery, peer to peer currency exchange)?
Debbie: I’m a huge advocate of the wider sharing economy and am involved with this increasingly in the UK on a political level after writing a government commissioned report on the sector late last year. I’m also the founding chair of Sharing Economy UK (SEUK).
Of course I use sharing services myself too. I’ve home swapped (as you would imagine), my kids are big fans of Borrow My Doggy and Uber is an integral part of living in London these days. I’m also a Zipcar user and I’ve looked at investing my own money through crowd-sourcing.
ST: Where do you see peer-to-peer travel services going in the next five years?
Debbie: Peer to peer travel is expected to be the main disruptive force in the travel industry over the next five years.
Firstly I think that consumers are going to keep seeking out more authentic travel experiences, which peer to peer travel is built for. So I think the growth we’ve seen in the sector is set to continue. I think we’ll see more of a convergence to home swapping too as ‘Timeshare 2.0’ if you like. That coupled with an increase in the millennial mind-set of ‘access over ownership’ – which is when we’ll see home sharing become a more mainstream concept.
I also think we’ll see more of the big travel companies start to get involved in the sector, with P2P serving as a space for collaboration with traditional operators.
