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HfP reader offer: FREE 3 month trial of Love Home Swap

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Today we are bringing you an exclusive reader offer in conjunction with Love Home Swap, a leading house swapping platform.

2021 could be the year that home swaps come into their own.

For anyone who does not feel secure about staying in a busy hotel, or has had their finances squeezed and feels that a foreign holiday could be out of reach, a home swap offers a genuinely interesting alternative.

What is Love Home Swap?

Love Home Swap is a members-only home swapping platform.

Boasting everything from chateaux to city pads, Love Home Swap currently has over 17,000 active members in more than 100 countries, and in excess of 18,000 homes to pick from.

Members don’t pay to stay at any of these incredible properties – they swap them between themselves, using the Love Home Swap platform to ensure security and avoid timewasters

How does the HfP free trial work?

Love Home Swap is offering HfP readers an exclusive free 3-month trial.

If you decide to remain a member after the three months are up, you can buy an annual platinum membership for just £99 (usually £288) when you sign up by midnight 31st December 2020 using this link.

Even better …. the £99 Platinum package comes with 4 free airport lounge passes.

How does Love Home Swap work?

Members can swap in one of two ways:

Option 1: Classic Swap

With a Classic Swap, members directly swap homes, either at the same time or on different dates. Other than their Love Home Swap membership fee, there are no additional costs.

Option 2: Points Swap

This is an option for anyone who has a second home which is vacant much of their time, or who spends a lot of time away from their own home. With a Points Swap, you don’t need to match your dates with another member. Instead, you host someone in your home while it’s vacant, and earn points to spend in any other Points Swap member’s home whenever and wherever you like. There is a small fee if you take this route.

On average, Love Home Swap claims that members save around £1,065 for a one-week trip (based on an average of £175 per night for a hotel room or holiday rental, minus membership and any fees).

How does Love Home Swap operate?

Love Home Swap is based around the idea of opening the doors to properties in places that their members will love – and providing home swappers with access to all the mod-cons that make a break that much more enjoyable.

For example, families can stay in homes that are well-equipped with toys and bikes. Child-free travellers can access perks like home gyms, a Netflix log-in, pool tables and games consoles. Members even swap cars and parking permits.

It’s important to note that a wide range of homes are accepted by Love Home Swap, from yurts and houseboats to rural mansions.

Members swap for a variety of different reasons and don’t just use their membership for one type of trip. Some may travel for work, so don’t need a huge space, where others might be swapping with their families so may need a bit more space. Sometimes members want to swap homes to stay close to their families, so even homes outside of conventional tourist destinations can be listed.

Love Home Swap is already a well-established business. This HfP offer will allow the company to add more UK properties to its network, and allow HfP readers access to a wide network of global properties in return.

For any nervous homeowners, you can choose to only swap with Love Home Swap members who have reviews or have been ID verified. There are also growing numbers of insurance providers that supply specific home insurance packages for people hosting in their own homes.

Pre-pandemic, Love Home Swap generated around 10,000 swaps between members every year. More than ever, their members are planning home swaps to arrange staycations for now, and long-haul journeys for next year.

If you don’t complete a swap, you get a free second year

Love Home Swap has a Swap Guarantee.

If you don’t arrange a swap in your first year, you get your second year of membership for free.

How do you sign up for your free trial?

There are two ways to join Love Home Swap:

Option 1: take a three month free trial

Click here and you can register for a three-month free trial. This will allow you to try out the site without any commitment whilst you begin to make holiday plans for 2021. After three months, if you choose to remain a member, you can choose one of their membership plans.

Option 2: join now as a Platinum member for just £99 and receive four free airport lounge passes

You can also join immediately as a Platinum member £99 for 12 months by using this link and clicking ‘Special Offer’. This is a substantial HfP reader discount on the standard price of £288.

Platinum benefits include the ability to list multiple properties if you have multiple homes! You will also get four free airport lounge passes every year (provided through Lounge Pass) and access to a dedicated Platinum swap team.

Conclusion

Travelling won’t be completely back to normal in 2021, and Love Home Swap offers an interesting opportunity to try something different.

The HfP offer of a three month free trial means that you have nothing to lose by signing up and seeing what sort of properties are available.

If you want to upgrade to Platinum membership, the £99 special offer price is available until 31st December 2020. To access the offer, please use this link.

Comments (23)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • gareth says:

    Pretty certain this is against t&c of most/all mainstream uk residential mortgages fyi

  • Andrew says:

    I can’t imagine anything worse than a bunch of strangers staying in my home.

  • Ken says:

    A Netflix login !

  • Dawn says:

    I have been doing house swaps for about five years now and it’s fantastic. I have spent 3 months in Australia on several occasions and also Florida. I stay in amazing homes and everyone has been very respectful. I swap my second homes in Turkey and Scotland. At first I was sceptical so did two swaps, one in Sri Lanka and one in Adelaide to try it out. Both were amazing and we’ve carried on ever since. Most of the people we swap with are retired and love travelling and have become friends despite the fact when we started this that we were just looking for the swaps, not to increase our circle of friends. I know it’s not for everyone but it’s certainly the best decision we made.

  • Peter K says:

    It’s free apart from the hotel you stay in in the UK to give 72hrs for COVID to die off or the cost of the cleaning team you need to bring in to make your house COVID clean after having someone else in your home.
    If course you could always clean it yourself as soon as you arrive home from your holiday. Great!

  • memesweeper says:

    My parents did this — through the very low-tech route of a classified ad the papers and exchanging letters — with a family on the outskirts of San Francisco back in the late 70s. It was my childhood holiday of a lifetime, a house with day-long sun, multi-channel TV, a waterbed, a pool, and a pool table in the garage. If I was ever to write a ‘my favourite hotel’ piece it would have to be about that place.

    The Americans got a London suburbs house in a rainy July and a roundabout at the end of the road they couldn’t navigate. 🙂

  • Vit says:

    I thought this only exists in the movie (i.e. The Holiday).

    • Blindman says:

      I did this back in the 70’s too.

      Swapped my 3 bed semi in Lincoln for a 5 bed house on the outskirts of Paris for a month.

      One of the many issues with this is trying to convince someone to stay in your house\location.
      Maybe easy for all Hpf readers who live in London as the location will sell itself even if your house is a poky flat.

      Then there’s the insurance and the trust .

      Must be easier now with WhatsApp email etc but back in the day it was a lot of letters and ultimately the trust of each other that made it work.

      If you are retired then maybe Housesitters is a better option.

      • Dawn says:

        The reason for Guest Points is for those who don’t want to do a reciprocal exchange. I don’t want to go to France and Spain, for example, so I take GP and I use them for places in Australia etc where I do want to go. Last year I spent a very nice time in Port Macquarie overlooking the Hastings River for my GP that someone had given me to go to Scotland. I’m signed up with homeexchange.com which is a partner site to Love Home Swap – I don’t know what the LHS is like at all, but the HE site suits me perfectly.

      • Wally1976 says:

        Yes I can’t imagine too many folks from around the world wanting to stay here in suburban West Midlands (on the western side with very poor travel links)! Not that my wife would allow it anyway. But a good idea for those it works for.

  • Jimmy says:

    Guess this would be a completely against any tenancy agreements. Shame because I rent a place which is probably incredibly attractive for tourists but not particularly expensive so I’d probably do quite well out of this.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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