My husband and I have recently arrived home following a home exchange. Actually, it was our first 3-way home exchange, and I thought you might like to receive some feedback.

We live in a fairly remote area of Northern England and to mark our more or less simultaneous retirements we wanted to do a home exchange to Hawaii, but try as we might, it was impossible to find anyone listed in Hawaii who wanted to exchange to our part of the word. After almost six months of trying we eventually decided upon a different approach. We made a list of everyone on the ExchangeHomes site who did want to go to Northern England and then took the third step of locating Hawaiian members indicating a required exchange location on that first list.

I suppose we were lucky because we found one, and after twice as many emails and phone calls as are usually involved in setting up a home exchange, everything came together. We went to Hawaii, the Hawaiians went to New York and the couple from New York visited our house.

It worked, but it wasn’t the same. We never experienced that comfort zone of reassurance that our exchange partners were staying in our home As I said, a lot of correspondence had passed back and forth before final agreements had been reached, but the whole arrangement somehow lacked that undefinable feeling that you had really got to know your exchange partners.

Don’t get me wrong, there were no problems and everything went very smoothly, but I just wanted to say that a 3-way home swap definitely isn’t the same as a straight swap and I probably wouldn’t do it again.