Review date: October 2020
Specialty: France mainly
€29.50/yr
French only
7000 listings in 74 countries (2000 active listings)
5221 of the 7000 listings are in France, and the rest are mostly in other French speaking countries.
Because this used to be a free network, I assume a high number of inactive listings. To calculate active listings I looked at Belgium, which has 133 listings. Out of those, only 43 have pictures. I’m pretty confident that listings without pictures aren’t really active. There will also be some additional number of listings that are inactive but used to use Trocky and so they do have pictures. I generously assumed about 1/3 of the members are active. This lines up with my calculations for Guest to Guest, another free network, which has more transparency around activity of members.
Disclaimer: I don’t speak French and the Trocky website doesn’t display in English. My review might miss some points that I couldn’t work out in translation.
Searching: You can search by country, keyword, or reference number. Within country you can filter down by region, but there are no other search filters. The results returned are just thumbnail pictures with a brief description of the property and the number of people it accommodates. Not enough information to narrow down the search without clicking into individual listings.
Listings: Detailed listings include the basic information about the home size and a brief free form description written by the member. The format is a bit old school, and not super easy to read. There is no map displaying the location of the homes.
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: I find Trocky overly simplistic. It’s lacking more than just a few FAQs, and the format could use an update. The website itself seems buggy. I tried to create an account but the sign up page was missing the button needed to proceed after entering my initial information. The website itself appears unchanged over the years.