A Home Exchange Membership Involves Hard Work
Home Exchange Blog:
We make a point of recording all the activity of our members in various administrative logs. Not for any purpose other than to record how they navigate and use the web site. It has often proved to be a very useful tool when planning site improvements. One very useful record the logs do provide us with is exactly how often members log in to their Admin Areas to edit and update their listings and to initiate contacts with fellow members.
Whenever a member contacts us to take advantage of our guarantee whereby if they don’t arrange a home exchange during their first year, their second year is free, I always check their activity during the year using the logs, and as often as not find virtually none. It’s a sad fact that these people have found the concept of home exchanging sufficiently enticing to have enrolled a membership, but that’s as far as it went. Two members who recently requested a free second year had joined last year, both in February, then never logged in to their memberships again. No photographs had been added, not a single email sent out. Clearly they had forgotten all about us until our ‘Membership Expiring’ emails arrived in their in-boxes.
Similar to these members is the winner of Know your Trade’s ’Capture The Crown’ contest in 2007. This lady’s listing won’t expire until later this summer, but to date, after receiving notification of her win she went online and set up her listing, but has never logged in since. No photographs added to her listing, not a single contact email sent out. It appears to have been a complete waste of a very well intentioned prize.
Of course sometimes people are extremely fortunate and do manage to successfully set up a home swap without any level of participation themselves, but it’s very, very rare. In fact if everyone followed this line of (in)action, the whole concept of home exchange would have died a death many decades ago!
The logs of virtually all the successful members record a high level of pro-activeness and participation, and if asked, they all will readily admit that this translates into half the fun. I never pretend that locating and setting up a successful home exchange is easy, but it can, without a doubt be memorable and extremely rewarding.
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