Trading places

No - this is not a post on the very funny film by John Landis (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465/).

The article at the bottom talks about people going abroad, that instead of paying for a room in some hotel, they switch their apartment with some people going the opposite direction. This is a very interesting concept. The most obvious reason is that this can reduce the budget of a trip abroad by some very large extent – the example given in the article is that an ordinary hotel room in NYC costs about 250 dollars for a couple. A 10 day vacation in the big apple living in someone else's apartment means about 2500 dollars savings. Moreover, an apartment is usually located in a less touristic, more interesting location, and may have better accommodations, a laundry machine, a bigger TV and so on and so forth…

The table above shows some of the more popular sites that allow people to find a switching partner.

How do you find an apartment to switch with? The Internet makes this very easy. There are several websites offering a service of connecting two people to switch their home for a limited time. This looks like a great solution for someone that cannot afford hotel prices or just prefers to feel at home even when he is away.

This is an example of a post in CraigsList.com asking for a switch between Berlin and Tel-Aviv (how I wish I had heard about this a month ago - Berlin was lovely, but I am sure a german apartment, for free, would have been a much more interesting surrounding than the nice but ordinary hotel room we took):

But what are the chances of me, finding someone from New York, who wants to be in Israel, or better yet, in Hertzelya for the exact time that I want to have my vacation in Manhattan? Does this mean I need to wait for a miracle in which someone chooses my apartment to spend his vacation in and then fly away to wherever he is coming from?

Manhattan sky line - is there anyone in the picture that wants to be my house switch partner?

What do you think about another option – instead of switching places between two people, why not have a circular transition? I will go to New York, the woman from NY will visit Rome, the Italian guy will have a nice apartment in Brazil, and Ronaldinio junior will stay at my place? This cannot be done manually of course, but a simple enough algorithm can try to give everyone the vacation they are dreaming about without going bankrupt.

The original article (in hebrew) can be found here: http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20080723_1004603&origin=ibo&strToSearch=%E3%E9%F8%E4%2C%EC%E4%E7%EC%E9%F3