Maybe it’s the floundering economy. Perhaps it’s Australians’ famous gregariousness. Whatever the reason, it seems Aussies are getting more interested in house swapping. At least one Down Under swapping organization is seeing a spike in registrations. Homelink Australia, one of the country’s oldest swapping networks, posted a 14-percent rise in registrations in September and is […]

If you’ve rented a self-catering holiday home before, you may realize that not all villas are right for all travelling parties. Some homes simply aren’t large enough to accommodate groups of a dozen or more. In other cases, you want a bit more privacy than one home can provide. Perhaps you’d like to separate the […]

Tourism market research company PhoCusWright has released some preliminary figures from its forthcoming report, Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change. According to the study, vacation rentals are a US$24.3-billion industry worldwide, with online rentals accounting for about 12 percent of those revenues. Given the plethora of online vacation rental sites, I’m surprised the figure for […]

Moments after posting my blurb about the Wall Street Journal‘s recent article on home swapping, I learned that Budget Travel and CNN had beaten the WSJ to the punch with a chatty article by Joanna Goddard on her experiences swapping her Manhattan apartment for digs in Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The details of […]

It seems the recent turmoil in the markets has the readers–or at least the editors–of the Wall Street Journal pondering less expensive ways to travel. Case in point: a recent article in the WSJ discussing the pros and cons of house swapping. The bulk of the story is a Q&A with Lois Sealey, who runs […]

The Korea Tourism Organization is making it easier for visitors to find accommodation options beyond hotels. An easy-to-search section of the KTO website includes lots of English-language details on unusual places to lay your head. For instance, there are links to over a dozen hanok–traditional Korean homes, usually featuring wide porches and sloping roofs–where you […]

Not surprisingly, given that it’s one of the America’s top tourist destinations–it drew 48.7 million visitors last year, including almost 800,000 Canadians–Orlando has thousands of vacation homes for rent. Vacation homes are a great option for two types of groups that flock to Orlando each year: families visiting the famous theme parks, and golfing buddies […]

A new site, www.VacationRoost.com, targets travellers who are interested in making the jump from hotel rooms to vacation rentals but uncomfortable with the idea of renting someone’s actual home. The site’s 100,000 properties in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean include lots of purpose-built vacation condos in beach, ski and outdoorsy locations. The site emphasizes […]

Roomorama.com, the new peer-to-peer vacation rental and room sharing service, has expanded beyond New York City to Boston, Chicago and Toronto. Listings in my old hometown of Toronto are a bit meagre at the moment, with just 24 properties. As always with any rental or home-sharing site, it pays to ask lots of questions of the […]

Looking for a studio in Midtown or a temporary pied-a-terre in the West Village? Try Roomorama.com, a new peer-to-peer service that helps travellers find short-term apartment rentals and spare rooms in New York City. Properties include a Williamsburg house owned by an actor who appeared in “The Departed,” complete with its own Zen garden, for […]