Review date: April 2014
stay4free.com
Founded in 1997
Basic membership free: includes 1 listing but can not respond to exchange requests
Premium membership $60/yr: unlimited listings and can respond to exchange requests
In 2011 the original owner posted the site for sale suggesting that someone who could put significant technical work into it could really push it forward. There is no information about what happened after that.
English only
2851 listings
Listings for select countries:
- USA: 377
- Middle East:
- France 168
- Spain 206
- UK: 190
- Brazil: 67
- Australia: 96
There is no easy way to get counts of listings overall or by continent. Searches for both “europe” and “south america” return pins all over the map and seem to reflect the total number of listings (2851).
Searching: There is no map based search, the only search functionality is in a search box where you enter location key words. There are a few advanced options for narrowing down the search results. But no option to search on people who want to stay where you live. A search on Granada, Spain returns 206 results which appear to be everything in the country of Spain, including some listings in Granada. Overall a rather ineffective search facility.
Listings: The search results display only very basic summary information making it hard to select which listings to view in detail. Each individual listing has all the relevant details easily organized for viewing.
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: Stay for Free has one of the nicer website designs aesthetically, but functionally it is among the worst.