Family Vacation Ideas

Traveling with children on a vacation can be one of the most educational and memorable family activities you will ever undertake. Or it can drive you nuts ! A home exchange vacation can help eliminate some of challenges faced by parents and make your next travel holiday with children a special traveling experience. A home exchange is a practical and affordable family vacation idea.

One of the many advantages of a home exchange is the extra space one has by vacationing in a home verses a hotel.

Parents and their children value the privacy, extra space, comfort and convenience of swapping homes for vacations.

Home exchange attracts many families with children. Families often arrange to swap with others with similar aged children. Children of all ages enjoy having a whole new set of toys, books, computer games and videos to occupy them while their parents relax in the comfort of a home. If you're traveling with small children, you might consider the convenience of not having to pack cribs, strollers, playpens and car seats.

If you have children, let them be in contact with your home exchange partner’s children, if possible. It helps ease their concerns about someone else staying in "their room," and they may even become friends. In fact, many families report developing long-lasting friendships with their swap partners.

We recently received an email enquiring about home exchange vacations and children. This is the answer we gave. We hope our answer provides you with some ideas.

We have gone on several exchanges with our son, at age 2, 3, 6 and 7. It was wonderful having an entire home to live in, along with a back yard for him to play in while on vacation as opposed to a small hotel room.

Probably the best things about a home exchange with children besides not having to pay money for accommodation were:

• the exchange home came with toys and books
• we were in residential areas close to play grounds
• when our son went to sleep in his own room, we were free to watch TV or do other things in the house and yard without worrying about waking him.

How do exchanges work? You need to find someone to exchange with. You can do this by placing your own listing on a home exchange site, is more than recovered by not having to stay in hotel rooms.

We also suggest to send out emails to other listers requesting if they would have an interest in an exchange. Once you have a contact, you can establish if these are the people you wish to exchange with. Usually you can get a good idea if you wish to pursue an exchange after the first few exchanges of email, photos and perhaps a phone call.