Briana Horne spent a three-week vacation in New York City in October 2022, where she watched a Halloween dog parade, attended a friend's film premiere, and saw a Broadway play.
Meanwhile, her apartment occupants were at Horn's house in Paris and wandering the city's cafes and museums.
Before swapping apartments, the pair met briefly to discuss their respective house rules and exchange neighborhood tips and recommendations – then they were off.
“It was perfect. We had three fun weeks and lived like locals,” Horn, 30, told The Washington Post. They both saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars on accommodation. “It's contagious. Now all of our friends are doing it too.”
Nearly two decades after Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swapped homes in the romantic comedy “The Holiday,” real-life house swaps are back in fashion. In Horn's case, a mutual friend helped arrange it. There are also websites, Facebook groups, and Reddit threads coordinating swaps, and many would-be swappers simply post on their social media profiles that they're offering their home in exchange for a temporary exchange for another's.
The tactic isn't new — house-swap coordination websites like HomeExchange have been around for years — but it's growing in popularity: After years of pandemic isolation, many travelers in their 20s and 30s are looking for authentic experiences, staying longer, discovering off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods and living like a local, travel experts and house swappers say.
But travel remains prohibitively expensive — airfares alone are 15 percent more expensive than they were five years ago — so it makes sense (and cheap) to swap places with friends, acquaintances, or even strangers who live elsewhere.
Makarand Modi, a professor at Boston University's School of Hospitality Management, said the pandemic's impact on workplace norms is also fueling this trend.
“The flexibility of work, and the ability to travel and work at the same time, makes it a great fit for things like house or apartment sharing or swapping,” Modi said. At the very least, home swaps could make for some cooler travel stories, he added.
“It will give you the opportunity to have a more fulfilling travel experience,” she says, “and you might be surprised at how good it feels to share your home with someone.”
Horn began participating in home swaps in 2022 after she stumbled across them and found a San Francisco couple willing to lend her their home for the holidays. She reached out to them, and the couple agreed that Horn would stay in their home for two weeks if she could stay in her apartment in Paris for the same period at a later date.
They signed a contract and Horn headed to California.
“I was a little nervous. I thought, 'Oh my God, what if this is fake? What do I do?'” she said.
But when she arrived, she found a real home — comfortable, clean — and her two weeks in a stranger's house went smoothly: Horn cooked, explored the neighborhood, and saved a lot of money.
Apartment swapping was a blessing for her, she said: It filled a need: She couldn't afford Airbnbs or hotels on long trips, and she didn't want to leave her apartment empty for weeks at a time. (After all, her plants needed watering.)
Later in 2022, Horn hopes to visit New York City, where she previously lived, so she turned to her friends and asked if they knew anyone in New York who would be willing to lend her their home for a few weeks in exchange for her apartment in Paris.
It worked: Horn, through a friend, arranged another exchange; she stayed with a friend in London last year and regularly offers her Paris apartment to host them.
Horn jokes that he's now an apartment-swap enthusiast, with a 10-page guide for visitors explaining how to use the oven and where to find good food nearby.
“It's really intimate to be in someone's space and see into their life even though you're not physically there. For example, if someone comes to my house, I have to learn how to compost vegetable scraps, which is an experience that's hard to get on Airbnb these days,” Horn said.
Airbnb is at least partially credited with making staying in other people's homes commonplace, says Modi, the hospitality professor. But as the company's popularity has grown since it launched in 2008, hosts have increasingly started listing investment properties rather than residential homes. As a result, travel accommodation alternatives are no longer budget-friendly options and no longer reliably offer travelers the local experiences the company once touted, Modi says.
“A study we did about five years ago found that more than two-thirds of Airbnbs in the U.S. are professionally hosted, not by individuals,” Modi said. “Airbnb is now more authentic, less accidental, sharing someone's actual home, and more curated.”
Airbnb countered that its platform gives travelers plenty of opportunities to live like a local.
“With more than 7.7 million accommodations in nearly every country around the world and more than 1.5 billion guest arrivals, we believe we offer travelers more options to experience local communities in more places than any other travel site, while providing important safeguards to keep travel safe,” company spokesman Sam Randall said.
But Matthew Kepnes, budget travel expert and author of the blog Nomadic Matt, says that if you swap homes with a “true local,” you're more likely to eat where your neighbors eat and meet your host's friends. The financial benefits can't be ignored.
“You don't want to pay double rent,” Kepnes says. “If you get mine and I get yours, we break even.”
The problem, Modi said, is that people who want to swap must have their own space to offer in a desirable location, narrowing the pool of people who can participate in swaps. Participants also must be able to handle the unexpected situations that can arise from living in a real home rather than a professionally managed space.
These factors have made the trend popular among mostly childfree professionals living in urban areas, for whom options continue to expand. A new home-exchange app, Kindred, launched in 2022 and has received more than 100,000 membership applications, according to the company. (Horn, who lives in Paris, signed up just recently.) HomeExchange has seen a 111% increase in U.S.-based subscribers since August 2020, the company told The Washington Post.
Valerie Hammerling, a Los Angeles resident who travels to New York City frequently for work, has booked two apartment swaps. After the first exchange, she started a Facebook group to facilitate the swaps. The community has grown to nearly 500 members, much of it in the past year or so, Hammerling said.
“With an apartment swap, there's a bit more of a sense of community,” she says. “You're accountable to each other. You manage the other person's space and they manage yours.”
