House swapping has grown very rapidly in Ireland. The attractions are obvious. You can spend your precious fortnight or three weeks somewhere really nice while living in a house or apartment which, if available, would normally be prohibitively expensive. We've just returned from Easton, Connecticut, a very small town about an hour and a half north of New York. This is serious stockbroker country within commuter train distance of Wall St. Houses are beautiful New England white clapboard, picket fencing on one or two acre gardens. Many have pools. The houses are very large with every conceivable convenience.
The only cost is whatever you choose to spend feeding and entertaining yourself. Another of the many, many advantages of the swap is that the swappers (or should that be swappees?) will have left you a list of shops (Shop and Save "worth the drive"), restaurants ("Splash, near train station, our favourite, try the warm beef salad"), in fact all the clues to their lifestyle. This can include (if you wish) their friends who will pop around to help clean the pool or invite you and the kids to meet their kids (playing with real Irish eight year olds seems to bestow an unusual social status!)
The swap system is really quite simple. It is like choosing a mail order bride. You sign up with an agency such as www, homelink.ie (probably the country's largest). This costs around £80 to have your home listed with photo in a book as large as the phone book full of little pictures and abbreviations describing your home and 12,500 others, from Australia to Zambia. Your castle is also listed and shown on the organisation's website. Good news for forests but bad news for the print industry is that the website-only option (at €90) has become more popular then the print version. The website has another advantage in being updated more often - ensuring that those who have already swapped are not still being offered - wasting rime for seekers and irritating for the sought.

Having swapped five times (US three times, Vancouver once and Perpignan, France once) we have honed our own selection process. With three young children we want to be beside water so we insist that any swap is close to the sea or must have a pool. You can of course insist on a five-bedroomed apartment overlooking the Champs Elvsees but you may wait a year or ten. Your expectations need to be realistic though they are often, very often, surpassed. If you want golf on your holiday for example it has been known that some families will offer you (temporary) membership of their club (as well as their house!).
The entire swap process is based on trust. If you don't trust someone you don't have to swap. You can have lengthy correspondence with them, email them a list of questions or queries, phone them and find out more about them, all to satisfy yourself that you would allow these people into your own home. Your Homelink listing gives a very full briefing on the house. How many bathrooms, bedrooms, receptions, proximity to public transport, how near to sea or mountains or towns or cities, as well as the occupations of those who live there. You will be asked for the same information. And of course you could be generous with the truth and make out that your perfectly fine house in Naas is only five minutes from the Book of Kells in Trinity but why would you? Naas will sell on its proximity to the equine world and it's commutability to the rest of the country. You wouldn't want the other side to dupe you so why would you do it them? 'There is, of course, the final referee who is the country co-ordinator, in the case of Homelink, Marie Murphy from Portmarnock, who no doubt would smell a rat if wild claims were being made.
When your house and all of the other members of the Homelink organisation, which has branches throughout the world, have submitted their requirements, the game commences.

The Germans are normally first to throw their towels on whatever is available and I would guess, from our own modus operandi, that we Irish are the probably last to commit. Commitment is what a lot of it is about. You are never obliged to swap. You may say that none of that year's offering suits your desire. You want to go to darkest Africa but no one in Kenya wants to swap his houseboat on Lake Nakuru with your bedsit overlooking the M50. Which raises another of the old chestnut questions. Why would anyone living in a 6,000 sq. ft. paradise home in Los Angeles want to swap to a three bedroomed semi-d in Kilkenny? The answer is that they know that they are unlikely to find an equivalent home in Kilkenny but that is where they have chosen for their holidays. That is the Kilkenny experience they are looking for. The goods news for Mr and Mrs Kilkennv is that their Los Angeles paradise beckons - albeit only for a fortnight. In other instances you may be offered an apartment in New York, as well as a country retreat in Virginia with a Florida condo thrown in for good measure. This offer came a few years ago from an Irish American lady who just wanted to go horse riding in Wicklow. You will also be surprised at the number of retired people, who have more than one home and who don't have to work around school and work holidays, who want to swap their homes.

If you don't like responsibility it has to be said that you may be better off taking your two-week break at Club Med where you simply walk to the airplane, walk off, do your thing then back to the airplane and home. With house swapping there is some work to be done. But, for me, it is a bit like surfing the net. I like seeing the endless possibilities - "will it be Mauritius or Monaco this year?" As I said there are many thousands of houses to plough through but by using the website this has become much easier as search engines are a huge benefit in sorting who wants to come to Ireland, is their home large enough, what time of year do they want to travel, will they have young children in their home are they willing to mind the dogs? You could think of your house swapper as an unpaid housesitter. That is why insurance companies generally (do check) like house swapping. Houses are not left vacant for someone else to rob the price of their holiday out of them.
One insurance that has to be paid is for the car. In Ireland anyway, in the States (land of the cheap if not absolutely free!) there is no problem being put onto their insurance. Here, you will pay around €70 per driver per car. The 'per car' is important as well as you may be offered a range of cars by your swapper. For a car nut like myself it is the cheapest hundred quid I could ever spend to have three weeks to drive a range of huge, ugly, thirsty American motors. This year's star model was an American Spacewagon big enough to play football in, all automatic, down to the auto sliding door and speakers which, when I couldn't bear hearing the theme from the movie Shrek for the thousandth rime, could be switched to being only hearable in the back. This wagon (along with Shrek) brought us to New York, south to New Jersey and north to the fabulous Mvstic Seaport, Connecticut. Mvstic is a showcase for Irish resorts as to how it is possible to transform a simple idea, (a living 19th century seaport) into a major attraction for thousands every day. It could be done just as simply in Wicklow or in Arklow.
If you are in a regular vacation resort you have to plan your dav trips. When you are living in a community while on holidays you think nothing of just going down the road (200 miles) for a drive.

So what are the downsides to house swapping? None that I can actually think of. Otherwise I wouldn't continue to do it. You pay for your flights, you pick up their car at the airport, you go to their home, you go native, you eat native, you play native and you really have a holiday. And by the way - your house doesn't get thrashed whatever about you.

www.homelink.ie part of the www.homelink.org group of web sites