Home swap holidays: how to stay for free and save thousands

theguardian.com:

Over the past 19 years, Ewan and Laura Hastings have been on 59 holidays. But the couple are not millionaires with a jet-set lifestyle – they live in a small village in Scotland and work in the voluntary and public sector. Their secret is house swapping, a tactic that has saved them an estimated £70,000.

“Last month we went to Pacific Grove in California and spent two and a half weeks in this beautiful detached house with wonderful views overlooking Monterey Bay and the coastal mountains,” Ewan says. “Next month we’re off to Berlin.”

He is a charity fundraiser and his wife, Laura, is a nurse. They live in an ordinary three-bed detached house in Roslin, a village in Midlothian, Scotland, not far from Edinburgh. That is the only reason they can afford to go on holiday so frequently.

“We started swapping our home in 2003, when our children were young,” Ewan says. “And I can say, categorically, we would never have gone on so many holidays if we had not been doing that.”

Using the home-swapping websites HomeLink and Home Base Holidays, they have arranged to stay in the homes of strangers all over the world, who have simultaneously been able to enjoy a Scottish holiday in the Hastings’ Midlothian home. Often, the two families will swap cars, too, by adding the other drivers on to their existing car insurance policies.

“I would hazard a guess that we’ve saved at least £70,000 over the years on car rental and accommodation,” Ewan, 55, says.

As the cost of living crisis deepens, a holiday where you get to stay somewhere for free – simultaneously enabling another holidaymaker to save money, too – has rarely seemed more attractive.

Many home swappers reckon they have saved four- or even five-figure sums on trips, and travelled to some