House Swap Holidays Review – May 2018

Review date: May 2018

houseswapholidays.com.au

Specialty: New Zealand and Australia only

Founded in 2009

Owned by two Kiwis living in Australia who also run Your Home for Mine, a virtually identical site but without the Australia and New Zealand focus.

$59.95/yr

English only

3310 listings

Although they say they are exclusively focused on New Zealand and Australia, the network does have 450 listings from other countries. Potentially a good one to join if you’re looking for an international swap to Australia.

Searching: There is no search by map functionality. Searching starts with a drop down menu for geography and optional dates to enter. The advanced search function allows more geographic detail and a few features and activities as well as number of bedrooms for filters. Search results can be displayed on a map or in list format with a basic overview of the properties.

Listings: Detailed listings are clean and easy to read and include a map, but I found the map function on the site overall to be buggy, often displaying nothing. Within the listings there is no standard format for displaying the number of people in the swap.

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.

Site design: There are a lot of self-referencing ads that pop up around the site encouraging you to join, but presumably those go away once you pay for membership. Otherwise the site is reasonably easy to use except for the maps crashing regularly on me.

Additional features: The site includes the ability to leave reviews and save listings to a favorites folder. It does not appear to have email functionality, instead members fill out a form to send an enquiry to listings they like, and the response will be directly to their personal email account.