‘The Holiday’ Popularized House Swapping — Now Travelers Are Using It to Save Money Around the World
Travel costs keep climbing, remote work keeps unlocking longer trips, and a growing number of people are rethinking where they sleep on vacation. House swapping — the same trade-your-home concept Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet popularized in the 2006 film “The Holiday” — has moved from movie plot to mainstream travel strategy, with two major platforms now reporting record growth heading into 2026.
The pitch is simple: stay in someone else’s home while they stay in yours, skip the hotel bill and the short-term rental markup, and connect with a real person on the other end of the booking.
How House Swapping Works
Modern house swapping runs through membership platforms that vet members, mediate communication and handle the exchange so no cash changes hands between travelers.
On Kindred, launched in 2022, members exchange nights rather than dollars. The platform now has 75,000 members across 150 cities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Western Europe. Signing up is free; members pay $15 to $35 a night to the company plus cleaning costs — roughly one-tenth the cost of a comparable short-term rental, according to the company.
“Over 90% of our homes are the real primary residences of the hosting member, and most of the year it’s where they live. Members are exchanging nights and not dollars, so there’s no way to purchase or sell nights on Kindred for cash,” co-founder Justine Palefsky told CNN.
“Hosts do not earn revenue by hosting, they just earn the ability to stay in somebody else’s home at another time,” Palefsky said.
HomeExchange, the platform featured in “The Holiday,” works on a flat-fee model: $220 a year for unlimited exchanges. It now has 200,000 members across 150 countries and recorded more than 460,000 exchanges in 2024. The company has grown 50% per year over the past three years.
Why House Swapping Is Gaining Traction Now
Affordability is driving the shift. Kindred’s 2026 Global Travel Forecast, a survey of 4,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K., found that 61% named affordability as their top motivation for 2026 trips. Women (66%) were more likely than men (57%) to rank it as their main concern.
“Affordability has always mattered, but it’s now the leading driver of travel decisions. People aren’t traveling less — they’re traveling smarter,” Palefsky told Forbes. “They’re looking for ways to maintain the joy of discovery while avoiding inflated prices and impersonal experiences.”
Palefsky argues the model also restores something that hotels and short-term rentals have stripped out.
“By removing that exchange of where one is paying the other, the relationship between two members feels really different. It’s much more of two peers who have both contributed something, who connect as humans in advance of their stay and decide to trust one another,” she told CNN. Kindred uses pre-trip video calls, in-app messaging and in-person community events to build that trust.
What ‘The Holiday’ Didn’t Show You: The Luxury Tier
Nearly two decades after the movie sent two heartbroken women trading homes between Los Angeles and the English countryside, the highest-end version of that fantasy is the fastest-growing slice of the market.
HomeExchange launched its Collection portfolio — a high-end membership tier — in 2022. “We’ve had a 200% increase in applications for HomeExchange Collection since launch,” David Bucci, head of the Collection portfolio, told Mansion Global. “And Collection members have booked more than double the number of exchanges than other members.”
The Collection now includes 5,000 homes and 2,500 members who pay $1,000 a year. More than half are in the U.S., with the rest spread across Canada, Australia and France.
For more information: Homestay Travel Guide: What Is It and Why Are Travelers Choosing It in 2026?
Bucci said the tier was designed to do more than create a price ladder. “With Collection, we didn’t just want to create another membership tier. We wanted to create a community.”
HomeExchange itself launched as a print catalog in 1992 and moved online in 1998 — a reminder that the idea pre-dates the movie that made it famous, and that its current moment is less about novelty than about timing.
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
