Review update: September 2020
Year founded: 2004
$58 per year
Owned by Jan Koncewicz
English only
11,561 listings (7846 active listings)
ExchangeZones used to be free and there are a lot of legacy listings that are almost certainly not active. They expire five years after the date of registration. My 7846 count are listings with pictures, a requirement since the fee was implemented. But the number of listings has only changed by a handful since last year so I suspect this is an over estimate of active listings.
Listings for select countries (not excluding those with no pictures):
- Brazil: 72
- United States: 3355
- UK: 464
- France: 937
- Australia: 487
Since I wrote my last review of ExchangeZones not much has changed with the network. The membership is slightly lower, and the website looks exactly the same. I interviewed the founder last year, and learned that this network is very hands off. They don’t intend to support the house swapping process beyond connecting exchangers with one another.
Searching: The search is based on drop down menus that drill down on geography so you will always get the results you expect for a given city or town, though you do need to know the region of the country in which you can find that town. Be sure to use the filter for “Category” to only look at home exchange listings. Otherwise you will be including rentals, B&Bs and even real estate for sale (though there are no real estate listings at this time). There is an advanced search function that allows filtering on amenities and attractions as well as the number of guests that can be accommodated.
The search does not have a filter for number of people who will be traveling for the listings (i.e. your house only has 1 bedroom and cannot accommodate a big family). There is no reverse search function to find people interested in visiting your home town.
Listings: The search results return a list that just gives a brief overview of each individual house. Within each individual listing there is a map and descriptive information about the home. But many of the listings don’t include information about the family with whom you would be swapping making it impossible to eliminate people who would not fit in your house. This appears to be a discretionary field that lots of people didn’t fill out.
This site offers the following variations on house swapping:
- simultaneous or non-simultaneous house swap – this is the traditional model where two parties swap houses for an agreed upon set of dates. Non-simultaneous works best with second homes, but is also useful for people going on vacation and leaving their home empty. In this case each party picks different dates for the swap.
- property rental – This includes B&B, traditional vacation rental, and homestay listings which they are promoting as a paid extended stay in someone’s home.
Site design: A dated look, but still reasonably functional. The site charges for a variety of small services like publicizing links to external websites, which makes the website a bit messy.
Additional features: ExchangeZones purchased HomeExchange24 but it is run entirely separate for now.
I was on it since registration was free, but now it’s asking to pay to update your announcement. You can still send requests anyway, I sent 10 recently and only got 2 answers.