Review date: August 2019
Founded in 2011
Specialty: Families with children
Pricing: $29/year for the first year
Owned by a family in Spain.
English, Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch
9,420 listings
Knok is somewhat unique among home exchange networks. First for it’s focus on families with children. And second for the integration of apartment rentals that are unrelated to the house swaps. Knok is offering rentals at a 10% discount to members through a third party rental agency. They are trying to be a one-stop-shop for travel lodging needs.
I interviewed the founder of Knok in 2016 and learned more about their goals and work on this project. Since then this network was acquired by HomeExchange, but the website has not changed so for now at least it’s being run entirely separately from the HE network. They haven’t updated any social media since 2017, which might mean the network is phasing out updates with a plan for integration into HE, it’s hard to say for sure.
Searching: The website has the standard search features of location, dates and size. And it includes a reverse search to help you find people looking to visit your home town. You can select whether you want to see homes for swap or rental listings. However there are no filters on features of the home, nor is there a way to filter on number of people in the swap family. Search results show basic overview info of the homes alongside a map with pins for location. Unfortunately only a few listings show per page, and the map only has pins for those listings. So there is no way to quickly see all the listings in a search result by location.
Listings: Information in the listings is nicely organized and easy to use.
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.
Additional features: Knok offers home insurance for house swappers. They also provide travel guides, specifically geared towards families, focusing on the most popular places to visit.
If you’re trying to figure out which Home Exchange network to join, check out my reviews of all the major house swap networks.
For some reason two of my browsers refuse to let me go to knok.com asserting the website is a significant security risk and could be a source through which I could be hacked. Any idea why this is happening???
It’s been like that for a while. My guess is the former owners are no longer putting money into the Knok website now that it’s been purchased by HomeExchange and so didn’t renew their security certificate, and that they will eventually transition over entirely to HE. But that’s just speculation, I don’t have any insider info on this one.