Back When Home Exchange Began
Some readers may not be aware that home exchange isn’t a new concept, thought up by some American entrepreneur. Far from it! Home exchange was actually born in Europe, back in the early 1950’s of academic parents. Scandinavian school teachers with long school summer vacations, a desire to travel, but limited funds, hatched the plan to exchange homes and visit and experience each others countries and cultivate international friendships.
Yes—home exchange began in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark!
The first two pioneering “clubs” to be formed around the concept of home exchange, were InterVac International Home Exchange Holiday Service and HomeLink International in 1953. InterVac was actually founded by some of the Swedish teachers who first conceived of the idea and continues to be headquartered in Kristianstad Sweden. The majority of their memberships come primarily from referrals. HomeLink is headquartered in Belgium.
Those two clubs completely dominated home exchanging for thirty years, then in the eighties a handful of other clubs were formed: ExchangeHomes (the owner of this blog), Home Base Holidays, Invented City, Hanney’s Boligbite and Landfair (the last two now vanished).
Since the eighties and present time many people have jumped on the home exchange band-wagon, seeing it as a great way to create their own business. Unfortunately, a great many of them have fallen by the wayside, leaving their members high and dry. Having said that, a few of course have flourished.
A very unfortunate offshoot of the home exchange success has been the occasional appearance of “rogue” companies that hire disreputable programmers who create code that steals or “pirates” large lists of members from established clubs and adds them to the database of the rogue clubs, immediately providing them with the false appearance of a large following.
The worst offender was based in China and called themselves AllHomeExchange.com. Early in 2008 they stole many thousands of listings and because of their location could not be brought to task by legal means. Fortunately, most of the members they had stolen gradually removed their listings from their database and the company floundered. Their URL is now nothing more than a blank page.
Another ploy used by many aspiring new clubs, involves joining several established home exchange organizations and attempting to email their members offering them free listings with their club.
I’m proud to be able to state that ExchangeHomes had the foresight right from the get-go to incorporate safeguards into our programming that prevented all pirating of our listings, both through the backdoor via code and by the less sophisticated means of email. Since we’ve been on the Internet we’ve never heard of one of our members having their listing stolen. Not a bad track record!
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