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WEB-SIGHT

Your home or mine?

When people talk about a ‘home away from home’, it’s usually a figure of speech, but at homelink.org, you get to go on vacation while staying in someone else’s house by swapping with them.

The advantages of this kind of arrangement are many.

For one, you save on accommodation costs and you get to live in an environment that isn’t impersonal, like that of a hotel room.

Further, you will exchange phone numbers and personal details with the person you’re swapping with and can get inside information on what to do in their locality and ask for their friend or neighbour’s phone number in case there’s an emergency.

Log on to the site and select ‘India’ as your country.

There’s a form that you’ll need to fill that makes note of your destination preferences, pictures of your home/landscape and duration of exchange desired.

You don’t necessarily have to exchange at the same time as the other swapper, though.

You only need to pay an ‘honour fee’ after you’ve found the first person you want to swap with. There’s an all-colour physical directory that can be purchased on the site.

It contains an updated database of swappers and eliminates the need to go online to choose a place to stay.

While the FAQs link on the site answers some basic questions, it helps to visit other sites like homeforswap.com to read about house swapping etiquette. It addresses some concerns that first-timers might have and also has a downloadable checklist (click on ‘Download Contract Here’ in the FAQs section).

A home swap vacation is an interesting alternative to visiting typical tourist destinations and will appeal to travellers who want a unique experience that they wouldn’t find on an ordinary travel website or through a large travel agency.

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