Last summer my wife and I spent a wee bonnie vacation in a beautiful Victorian home in the prettiest seaside town in Scotland. We pubbed aimlessly, hung out in Glasgow’s funky west end, made an epic drive around northern Scotland, hacked our way around the planet’s most hallowed links and even flew to Italy for a few days. We also comfortably hosted several friends who flew over to join us. Perhaps the most appealingly Scottish aspect of all is that the whole month-long extravaganza cost us a pittance.

How? We pulled off a home and vehicle exchange with our new best friends, whom we met through a home exchange posting online. Originally we had consulted HomeLink, which, with some 11,000 listings, is one of the world’s largest exchange clubs. But when bites for Vancouver were few, we went on Craigslist. Angus, Kathleen and their two adorable daughters economized as thoroughly at our home in Vancouver as we did in North Berwick—and claim to have had an even better time.

This was our second home exchange and their fourth, which I guess renders us experienced hands at the one Internet-enabled swapping phenomenon that people can talk about without hushing their voices. Home-exchange clubs have been around for decades but their numbers are exploding as printing and mailing costs evaporate and members discover how easy it is to connect with each other via email, even as they check out one another’s bona fides using Google. San Francisco-based Leslie Nicodemus, who started the home exchange-monitoring site knowyourtrade.com in 2006, estimates that in the past two years total home listings have increased 20 percent and at least a dozen new agencies have launched.

I’d had previous happy experiences using Craigslist to find short-term sublets while working in New York and, along the way, developed a minor addiction to the site’s Housing Swap postings, so cheery and hopeful even when clearly hopeless. (“My one-bedroom basement suite for somewhere warm.”) There, last January, shone Angus and Kathleen’s carefully understated yet highly appealing description, offered up in return for a Vancouver spot that sounded a lot like our home.

It all went off shockingly well. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d been overconfident, even negligent. We hadn’t done much research or taken many precautions, beyond confirming that the car insurance would remain valid with Scots at the wheel. (Not the case with all insurers, so do check.) Certain friends couldn’t believe we’d fly abroad to spend a month in the house of someone we’d never met, just as these possibly strange strangers moved into ours.
Wondering if we’d been less than prudent, I called up North Vancouver resident Jack Graber, who oversees the Canadian arm of HomeLink and for many years also headed up its international organization. What worst-case scenarios could have engulfed us?
“No question there,” he said. “Trip cancellations. If grandma gets sick and one of the parties has to cancel at the last minute, it can be expensive,” Graber explained. HomeLink helps out not only by finding another partner within its membership, which resembles an extended family (some have completed more than 100 swaps), but also by offering cancellation insurance and an array of guidelines and contracts. Yet, Graber allowed, he has still fielded occasional gripes about mild misrepresentations or swappers who failed to clean up after themselves.

I’d heard the same from relatives who’d preceded us down the home exchange trail. For example, the house that was located in the south of France exactly as advertised, except not overlooking vineyards but in an industrial zone abutting a nuclear reactor. The French swappers had failed to mention this, but no matter—my cousin’s young family had a great time regardless.

We like to think the same was true of our first swap partners, a pair of French physicians. We worked furiously to finish a renovation before their arrival, but the odd detail was lacking when we stepped onto the plane. If they noticed, they saved the curled upper lips and withering comments for their friends back home. Meanwhile, their place proved to be a beautifully renovated 17th-century villa and by far the nicest house in their little town near the Atlantic. The big skies, rolling fields and crashing waves of France’s forgotten west coast suited us perfectly.

That’s the thing with a home exchange: it gets you to a place you didn’t expect to be, whether geographically or psychologically, immersing you in the culture at a neighbourhood level and rendering you more a traveller than a tourist.

Of course, “travelling” these days is practically supposed to be accompanied by occasional bouts of stress and even privation. That’s the other thing with an exchange: you have your own kitchen and corner store, your deck chair, bed table and en suite bath. It feels an awful lot like... home.