Free accommodation in someone else’s home might seem like an easy hack for cheap travel, but there’s more to house-sitting and swapping than a free room. While sitting usually involves caring for pets in exchange for accommodation, swapping requires participants to make their own home available to others for the pleasure of staying for free in someone else’s.
Angela Laws, a founder of Trusted Housesitters, the world’s largest house-sitting platform with more than 200,000 active members, wants to be clear with those considering giving it a go: “It’s not a free vacation. It’s not free travel. It’s not free accommodation. It is a mutually beneficial exchange between pet parents and sitters.” She stresses too that anyone wanting to take advantage of the benefits needs to appreciate and honour the responsibilities it entails.
On the other hand, it can work well if you have your own home. Emily Budin, an Australian living in the UK, has swapped her zone two London apartment for New York brownstones, a Christmas in Switzerland, chateaus in the south of France, Croatian villas – and more. She says, with caveats, the practice is a “super-easy” way to banish accommodation costs from your holiday budget. Swaps don’t always have to be simultaneous, which makes platforms like Home Exchange – made famous by the film The Holiday – much more convenient. Budin says its annual fee is about equivalent to one night in a decent hotel in a big European city.
“You can earn points while your house is empty,” Budin says. If you’re visiting family elsewhere, and use them to “pay” for a property during a time that suits your vacation schedule. Meanwhile, when you’re away, someone else might use their points to book your place, which will in turn earn you more points. This also means the swaps don’t have to be like-for-like. Budin says a reasonable quality property in a central location might command the same points per night as a more remote but more lavish one. If your place isn’t top tier, you can still bank your points to spend on more premium properties.
If you’re renting, you can still join HomeExchange, but the onus is on the swapper to check if their rental agreement allows it.
Communication is key
Laws says you can find a sit within 24 hours, but in her experience, “the more communication, the better”. If a listing aligns with your experience as a sitter, the first step is to reach out through the secure messaging system within the platform. Laws recommends a video call, where both parties can ask questions, take a virtual tour of the home, and even share their own living space.
Hannah Wilkinson, 32, started house-sitting to see Australia on the cheap with her boyfriend in 2023 and has chronicled the experience on Substack. Two years and nearly 30 back-to-back sits later, Wilkinson says the rare hiccups she has experienced could have been avoided by more thorough communication.
Laws says the sit she is currently organising has involved at least five days of back and forth to ensure everyone is on the same page.
For house swappers, similar advice applies. Budin says she doesn’t always bother with a video call, but does like to make expectations clear and be sure to ask about what her hosts expect of her via messages. She says even when “rules” aren’t explicitly outlined, it’s expected that you won’t be treating the property as if you’re a paying customer, but rather a personal house guest: “You’d be neighbourly, make sure to put the bins out, things like that.”
Be flexible
Wilkinson likens the house-sitting to backpacking: “You need to be organised, but you also need to be completely open to the unexpected.” She and her boyfriend, for example, spent a few weeks in Jindabyne simply because the opportunity arose.
Swapping can also be pretty spontaneous, according to Budin, who says that if her husband were also a remote worker, she believes they could stay elsewhere “every other week if we wanted to”.
Be organised
Wilkinson says staying on top of what’s available and being prompt with messages go a long way to securing the most desirable house-sits. She likes to lock things in about a month in advance.
Budin says the preparation for swapping can be a “bit of a headache”. She increases her cleaners’ hours before and after having people stay at her place. While it’s not expected that all your personal effects will be removed, it’s customary to leave empty shelves in the fridge, pantry, closet and vanity, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like an Airbnb, but it definitely has to be livable.”
Is it weird?
Budin says it’s all a state of mind. If you come to terms with people being in your space, house swapping is a legitimately good way to access properties you might not otherwise be able to afford.
“You’re either a house swapper or you’re not,” she says. “But for me, the benefits far outweigh the negatives.” She says while she has come home to surprises, like the house being messier than anticipated – and once finding a vibrator left behind in her dresser – she has never had anything broken or stolen. “I’m sure there’s been a few men that have worn my underwear, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
“There’s also insurances that are in place and a holding deposit that’s kept every time you swap,” she says. Emmanuel Arnaud, the CEO and co-founder of HomeExchange, told Guardian Australia via email that the platform had facilitated nearly half a million swaps in 2024, up 42% on 2023, and that 99.7% of exchanges occur without incident.
For Wilkinson, arriving at one house-sit to discover there was an expectation that the dogs would share her bed was “a bit much,” but she says this kind of detail can be ironed out in advance.
Pets are the priority when sitting
Of house-sitting, Wilkinson says simply: “If you aren’t into pets, just don’t even consider it.” She has had to scrub poop out of carpets and once devoted weeks to caring for a blind pug whose health deteriorated rapidly in their owner’s absence. The experience, she says, was like “looking after a toddler”.
Even with a healthy animal, she points out, “you’re going to have to give up at least an hour of your day”. While you can be strategic and look for sits with independent felines or older dogs that need less exercise, the fact remains that caring for pets is what you are doing in exchange for accommodation, so it needs to be seen as a job.
