The home rental network, NightSwapping, announced on February 11 that they have joined the house swap network HomeExchange. I assume this means NightSwapping was purchased by HomeExchange. I learned about this from a French member of NightSwapping who received an email. I am also a member of NightSwapping, but I received no emails. Possibly this is a delay in translation as they are based in France.
To be clear, NightSwapping is a home rental platform, not a home exchange network. They pivoted from house swapping over a year ago, to instead offer home and room rentals. Based on my analysis in that linked post, this network has a ton of listings that aren’t active, and a lot of false pricing on these listings. In truth I’m not entirely clear on the appeal of NightSwapping since the cash-based system is no different from AirBnb, but with fewer options and lots of inactive members. I have to wonder if they had enough active members to justify this purchase.
On NightSwapping, when you host guests you earn money. That money can either be cashed out to your bank, or spent for stays with other people on NightSwapping. Whatever the other person is charging for a night stay is what you pay, either out of your account balance or with a bank card.
In searching for a fun graphic to include with this post I discovered that the documentation on NightSwapping still talks about “nights” instead of cash, even though the change to a cash-based system was over a year ago. I sure hope HomeExchange didn’t pay very much for this network. The website and its contents overall seem very buggy and out of date.
The integration of this network into HomeExchange presumably will require a transformation of this cash-based system to the HomeExchange points-based system. It will be interesting to see how HomeExchange integrates the network and deals with the inactive members and the cash-based system. I hope they just bought the member list and plan to invite them to join HomeExchange rather than converting people over without action on their part.
The Announcement
Here is the full text of the French email, run through Google Translate, apparently written by the HomeExchange staff (you can see the original in French here):
Dear NightSwappers,
We are pleased to announce that NightSwapping has joined HomeExchange, the global leader in home exchange.
This event comes at a special time, as HomeExchange.com and GuesttoGuest merged earlier this year to meet under the HomeExchange banner. This combination means, for you, the possibility of having access, very soon, to the services enjoyed by our international HomeExchangers community, including a powerful platform with more than 400,000 available housing, as well as assistance and guarantees for each exchange.
According to Serge Duriavig, founder of NightSwapping:
“I am delighted that the company I created, now join the leader of the house exchange. Our members will benefit from a whole new range of travel options and services that will enhance their experience. I could not hope for a better future for the passionate home exchange community that joined NightSwapping.”
We would like to welcome you to our community.
Like you, we believe that home exchange is a way of traveling not only economic, but also authentic and humane. Like you, we know that home exchange allows us to be welcomed as guests around the world.
We are currently studying the best way to give you all the benefits our members are enjoying, and we will come back to you in the coming weeks to give you more details.
For technical reasons we are unfortunately unable to answer phone requests and e-mails for the moment. We apologize for the inconvenience.
You can discover the HomeExchange platform today.
See you soon,
The HomeExchange team
Lot of changes in homeexchange land. Surely not all for the better!
Perhaps we should start to use youtube as platform so the organisation can have earnings based on views instead of guestpoints or whatever “currency”.