The first time Rachel Levak tried home swapping, she wound up having the time of her life on the Athens Riviera, spending mornings on the beach and afternoons café-hopping. “It was so cool—and there were virtually no other Americans around,” recalls the Miami-based product manager. What’s more, her two-week stay cost a grand total of $435 in service charges and cleaning fees, or about $30 a night, because she’d arranged to swap places with Andreas Sellinidis, a photographer who lives in New York and has a vacation home in Athens.
This renovated four-story brownstone with a private garden in Brooklyn is listed on HomeExchange.
Home Exchange
That kind of incredible value proposition is driving renewed interest in home swapping, even among affluent travelers who can (and sometimes still do) splash out on hotel suites and vacation rentals. While the concept dates to the 1950s, when university professors arranged summer-break swaps, this style of travel is also getting a boost from the ongoing availability of remote work and from technology platforms that make trading places easier.
“Travel has become increasingly more expensive and transactional,” explains Justine Palefsky, CEO and cofounder of Kindred, a home-swapping platform. The company, which launched in 2021, has seen rapid growth, with a five-fold increase in bookings from 2023 to 2024 and a global membership of nearly 200,000 travelers—up 700 percent since 2024.
“We offer an alternative rooted in community,” Palefsky says, “and our members can travel more often and stay longer,” because swapping makes trips so much more affordable.
Other companies are seeing similar growth. HomeExchange, a legacy player that helped create the $5 billion home-swapping industry, says its membership has grown 32 percent since last year, to more than 250,000. In 2022, the company launched the HomeExchange Collection, a subset of listings aimed at luxury-minded travelers that features castles, yachts, and villas. ThirdHome, meanwhile, is aimed at second-home swappers, coordinating exchanges of properties valued in the millions. “Luxury used to be about having more,” says Wade Shealy, the company’s CEO and founder. “Now it’s about experiencing more.”
Other community-based platforms target specific types of travelers. Behomm curates properties for creative types and design lovers, while MyPlace connects friends of friends in a private network. Hermanas, a female-focused community on WhatsApp, recently launched Pollen, which allows subscribers ($50 per year) access to listings. Kommu is an app that takes inspiration from social networks, letting members search for stays among friends of friends.
For longtime swappers like Vivienne Steels, who has been using Homelink to arrange stays for decades, all this recent growth is nothing but a good thing. The Dorset, England–based traveler has taken more than three dozen home-swapping trips, to Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.S., among other destinations. “The process has certainly gotten a great deal easier with everything going online,” Steels says. “Exchanging has vastly enriched my life.”
A version of this story first appeared in the November 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Trading Spaces.”
