Maybe it’s not causal, but a recent survey found that home exchangers are more trusting and overall happy with the swap experience. Homeexchange.com collaborated with the University of Bergamo (Italy) on a study conducted on members of this popular home exchange site to look at the profile and motivations of the typical house swapper. The study was done via survey in 2013, and while the report doesn’t offer comparative data between home exchangers and non-home exchangers, it does have some interesting general facts about people who use this aspect of the sharing economy for vacation lodging.
Homeexchange.com users are not necessarily representative of the general population of house swappers. For one thing they are skewed towards membership in the United States even though home exchange is much more popular in Europe. The researchers do break out statistics by country to address this issue, but for the most part I’m just going to talk about the results overall. The text around the data in the public report sometimes reads more like a marketing brochure than a formal research report, describing homeexchange.com membership and motivations but not attempting to compare them with other non-home exchange people. With that disclaimer, here’s my summary of the interesting results.
Demographics
Overall home exchangers are older than what I’d think of as the typical internet savvy sharing economy user. The largest age group is 45-54 (28%) and 19% were over 65 while only 6% of those surveyed were below the age of 34.
Almost 50% of home swappers are families with kids. I don’t have children, but it seems obvious that it’s more expensive and difficult to travel with kids, so I can see how having a house with a kitchen, and maybe even with toys, would make family travel a lot easier and cheaper.
The Homestay Index, which I’m going to write about later this week, provides some interesting comparative data on demographics of travelers. A majority of people who use hosted peer to peer rental lodging (aka Homestays) for their travels are under 40 (68%), with the vast majority of those under 30 (47%).
In mid-2012 AirBnb provided an overview of people who booked lodging on their site the day they hit 10 million nights booked. Just under half of their customers were under the age of 30, while only 10% were over age 60.
The bottom line: lots of people use the sharing economy for travel lodging, and home exchangers are skewed towards the older age groups. Perhaps not surprising since a prerequisite to doing a home exchange is generally having a home without roommates.
Exchange experience
The home swappers surveyed were interested in environmentally friendly tourism and cultural experiences, and a significant portion are involved in volunteer work within their communities. And almost 70% of swappers report preparing their own food while traveling. This is an obvious benefit of the house swap, and a way to save more money, something that many home exchangers reported as a key driver to their use of home swapping.
Overall home exchangers are pretty happy with their swaps. Only 6% of respondents reported being dissatisfied with their experience. The study provides no additional information on what swappers were not happy with, so it’s hard to say anything more about this except that the risk of a bad experience seems to be pretty low.
Trust
Among homeexchange.com survey respondents, 75% believe “most people are trustworthy.” A 2013 Guardian study found that 54% of people in the UK believe most people can be trusted. And a 2013 USA Today poll found that only one third of Americans trust each other. So this result for home exchangers is strikingly different than the average, especially considering that the study disproportionately included Americans. Interestingly, the results broken down by country show that 71% of Americans agreed most people are trustworthy (still very high), while only 60% of the French agreed with this statement, and trust was highest among Swedes at 90%.
It’s hard to say if people who participate in home exchange are more trusting overall. Or if the experience of doing home exchanges makes people more trusting. I suspect it is a bit of both. The good experiences reinforce positive trust, but there is a trust threshold people have to hit in order to open their home to strangers. If you’re interested in this topic here’s something else I wrote about trust and the sharing economy.
While researching trust surveys I found a study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2014 which found that 25% of Americans think Fox news is the most trustworthy news source, so I’ll conclude this post with the observation that perhaps American’s judgement of trustworthiness overall is a bit flawed.
