Who dares to exchange house?

House swapping is one of the rising trends in global tourism. The idea is quite simple: instead of spending a fortune on hotels or apartments when we travel, we try to find someone in the desired destination who wants to visit our city, and we take the opportunity to swap houses. They will be in our house, we in theirs, and in short, we can all spend a few days abroad without spending a dime on accommodation, and with the comfort of being in a lived-in house, where you know they will have a proper Netflix and toys for the children.

These exchanges have nothing to do with Airbnb: here we are not dealing with a rental (legal or illegal) because there is no money involved; this is about lending your house as you would to friends. In fact, the practice is ancient; people have been lending houses since forever, but social networks have made things much easier, with a multitude of portals like Home Exchange, where more than 65,000 members offer their homes hoping to find someone to connect with.

At first glance, house swapping always raises suspicions. Leave my apartment to a stranger? And, sleep in my bed? Come on, no way! But the key to everything is mutual trust: you will sleep in their bed, and they trust that you will take care of their house and not cause trouble, therefore, distrust disappears, and the probability of having clashes in the communal staircase -as happens with tourist apartments- drops to practically zero.

Some academics like Antonio Paolo Russo have already analyzed the impact of this phenomenon, characteristic of the so-called "collaborative economy." They note that, on the one hand, due to its non-monetary nature, house swapping sidelines a good part of tourist accommodations (hotels and apartments). Furthermore, staying in someone's apartment instead of using Airbnb is not trivial in cities with housing emergencies like Barcelona: if everyone traveled by sharing houses for free, the thousands and thousands of tourist apartments -empty flats where no one lives- would cease to make sense.

Exchanging also allows you to experience cities "like a local," as you often stay in peripheral neighborhoods (and not in tourist-saturated historic centers). And the guest you will have at home will live in the neighborhood, shop in the stores where you shop, and, in general, try to integrate into the daily life of the neighborhood. It is true that a vacationing family is a vacationing family, and they may stay up late chatting with the windows open, but in summer we also hear the reggaeton at full blast from the neighbor, and we don't call the police for that.

Home exchange is a phenomenon that occurs mostly in Europe and the US (that is, in rich countries), and the success of the initiative (most of those who exchange repeat, and large families, who save the most, even agree to exchanges from one summer to the next) has meant that little by little, exchangers have been grouping into thematic and exclusive communities. One of the closest to us is Behomm, a home exchange community exclusively for people with creative professions (artists, photographers, designers, architects...). It works by invitation, and its members ensure that they will exchange their lofts and fashion homes with other design lovers and decoration fanatics. Behomm was created by Eva and August, a couple of designers from Barcelona, who in less than 5 years of existence have closed hundreds of exchanges for the 2,500 members they have worldwide, from Iceland to Cape Town.