How home exchange works
How it works
Home exchange simply means that you and your family agree with a family from a different area to live in each other's homes during your holiday. The length of the holiday exchange is entirely up to you.
Sign up
Set up listing
Search destinations
Contact partner
An Intervac membership offers you the freedom to explore neighbourhoods and lifestyles not available through travel guides. When specifying your preferred exchange destinations be sure to choose “Open to all offers”. You may find yourself vacationing in a Danish fishing port on the Baltic Sea, or a ranch in western Canada, a village in rural France or a barge moored in central Amsterdam. If you are flexible you can let serendipity take you to places you never dreamt of!
Sign up today
Set up your listing
Set up your listing. As soon as you have opened your account, your enter your member area to fill in your details and start creating your listing. It is important to repeat that until you have actually completed your listing, it remains invisible to other members.
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Go to “Create my listing”
After you have logged in, on the member home page, you will see a button "Create My Listing". In the left-hand column just underneath the orange navigation box you will see a set of links titled "My Listing" to edit or view it.
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Fill in form
Fill in the form with your desired travel dates, information about your family, your home, and your surroundings. Don't forget to save your changes by clicking the orange button at the top, or the bottom of the page.
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Your destination wishlist
Using the "My Listing" navigation click on "Destinations Wishlist" to begin to alert other members to your wish to visit their area. By default "Open for All Countries" is chosen, but you can enter as many countries, regions, and cities as you like. The more you choose, the better your chances of getting offers from people in those places using the Reverse Search to find potential exchange partners.
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Place your google markers
You can place some helpful marker icons for your surroundings on your map. If necessary, to correct your localisation, you can even drag the position of the red dot (the Google Marker) of your geographic card.
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Additional text and photos
Take some time and look at other member's listings. Then gather together photos of your home, your family and pets, your neighbourhood, and your region. Now you are ready to upload them and to write (unlimited) free text to fill in your listing. You can do both of these things by clicking on "Add Text and Photos" in the "My Listing" navigation.
Search destinations
We have advanced search functionalities which will help you find your perfect match!
- Photos and Descriptive Text
- A map of surroundings
- Search facilities
- Reverse search
- Match alert!
- Integrated messaging system
Need help from our national representatives to find a good match?
We have thirty-five national representatives around the world and most of them have been helping members like you find great exchanges for twenty years and more. Our agents know the ropes, they know the best tips, and they will do everything they can to help you find a great exchange. Intervac is located in your country, and speaks your language.
Contact prospective partners
Our messaging service allows you to send an inquiry by clicking on the "Send Email" link you will find on every listing when you are logged in. You will automatically receive a copy of messages that you send through the Intervac online system.
Contact templates
Introduce yourself
For each holiday you are planning, compose a contact template introducing you and your family to potential exchange partners. Include interesting information about your home and neighbourhood, and be sure to include the dates you are available for an exchange.
Prepare to be contacted by others
Prepare a couple of answer templates for replying quickly to offers you receive. You can write one for offers that you are not interested in, and another for offers that interest you but for dates when you already have an exchange or are not available. When you receive a message from another member, you can easily load one of these templates into the response box online and edit/personalise the text for that response before sending.
You could also prepare a contact template for use in the initial agreement phase.
Detailed guidelines and online help 24/7
We have detailed guidelines for home exchange that are updated regularly in light of our organisers and their members' experience. Our online system is well documented with plenty of help text to give you a boost when find yourself stuck in the middle of the night.
