Actually, I can do better: travel writer Laura Byrne Paquet has just written what amounts to The Compleat Guide to Home Exchange for SlowEurope and it contains everything I’d tell you over coffee–including links to my own Top 10 tips for a successful home exchange and a comprehensive round-up of all the home exchange agencies out there.

Check it out and if you STILL have questions, get in touch. But you buy the coffee…!

We’re really looking forward to welcoming our German house guests before we leave. Last year we didn’t get the chance to meet the French family we exchanged with, but after months of e-mail correspondence we still felt like we had a relationship with them. It’s a treat to actually be able to connect this time around. (And to my Bowen friends who might be reading this: if you see Christa and Uwe around the island, please say hello!)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: home exchange makes it possible to travel to places you thought you’d never be able to afford, and to immerse yourself fully in another culture–whether it’s on the other side of Canada or the other side of the world. Except for airfare, it costs roughly the same to live away as it would to stay home, especially if you arrange to swap cars as well as homes. If you’re hesitating–don’t!

Have you participated in a home exchange? What service did you use? And what advice would you offer to others who are thinking about it?

Related links: Top 10 Tips for a Successful Home Exchange and  66 Practical Home Exchange Tips

I remember.

My kids were born in the ’80s and ’90s when cabooses were all but gone from Canada’s train fleets, but that did not stop my son, Adam, from falling into a train fetish that began with Thomas the Tank Engine at age two and ended–well, it has never really ended–with a trip through the Rockies on the Rocky Mountaineer at age 14.

I wish I’d known about James LeFresne’s Train Station Inn in Tatamagouche, on Nova Scotia’s “forgotten” north shore, a little earlier in my parenting career. When I climbed up into the cupola in my own vintage caboose–CN Number 79815—earlier this spring, my first thought was, “I am bringing the grandchildren here.” (This is significant in that I don’t yet have any grandchildren, nor the prospect of some anytime soon.)

This is a great rest stop for train buffs of any age. The carefully restored cars–seven cabooses and a boxcar–are clean, spacious and can sleep up to four people comfortably. And the breakfast room in the century-old Tatamagouche train station (James bought it in 1974 when he was just 18 to save it from demolition) is a veritable shrine to Canadian train history. If you have a Thomas fan in tow–or you used to be one–this is the place to pause on the drive from Halifax to New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island.

You might have seen Tatamagouche recently on TV–star of CBC TV’s The Week the Women Went. The community dock and playground the men built for their absent women–just a 10-minute walk along the tracks from the Train Station Inn–is a great place for a summer picnic…

I love Quebec City’s Le Chateau Frontenac and Toronto’s Royal York and Victoria’s Empress. But my favourite will forever be Alberta’s Banff Springs hotel, the grande dame of the Fairmont clan in Canada. She helped put Canada on the tourism map more than a century ago and today I can forgive this dowager her tour-bus hordes and over-priced restaurants. These are trivial concerns in the face of such resilient beauty. Add it to your bucket list–and take advantage of the great summer sale on now until June 29.

I’m giving away a $100 Fairmont Hotels gift certificate in a random draw at 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time on Wedneday, July 1. You can use it at any Fairmont hotel, towards a room, a meal–or just a martini in the lounge.

Leave your birthday greetings to Canada in the comment section below, and you’ll be entered to win. And if you link to this contest on Twitter–remember to add RT @theseboots so I know you did–you’ll get a second entry. Good luck!

Like today, for instance. Today, I’m in Hamilton, Ontario, having flown through the night to get here in time to speak at an education conference. I actually arrived at three in the morning–more than a little frazzled after a weekend that included auditioning for the 2010 Winter Games Ceremonies, and watching my youngest graduate high school.

A bit of coddling was clearly in order, so I dug into my files and retrieved the card for Rutherford House B&B, where I’d stayed three years earlier and whose kick-ass breakfasts were reason enough to return. It’s a 10-minute walk to the convention centre, in a neighbourhood of gracious old red-brick estates.

Janis Topp, chief cook and bottle washer, didn’t hesitate for an instant when I asked if I could arrive in the middle of the night. She set up the iron and ironing board for me in advance and arranged for a late breakfast. David, her husband, offered to drive me to the conference centre so I’d have extra time to get myself together in the morning. (And I don’t doubt that should I have needed it, they would have let me use their washing machine too.)

For less than the cost of a room at the conference hotel, I got a pillowtop king bed; a cozy, quiet, light-filled room with access to a private sitting room if I wanted a change of scene; free wifi and parking; an in-suite fridge; coffee, water, and as many Hershey’s Nuggets as I could stuff into my face–which isn’t as many as you might think given the full-meal-deal breakfast that makes it easier to say no to Bad Food Choices for the rest of the day.

Consider a B&B the next time business takes you on the road in Canada. It’s the next best thing to coming home to mom…

Do you have a favourite B&B to recommend in Canada? Please share it here!

Dear Julie:

We are Tony DiCaprio and Anne Marie Babkine, a Canadian family from Montreal currently living in the south of France. We’ve followed your blog (on and off) but hadn’t visited in a few weeks. We just dropped by and noticed all this activity in the past several weeks regarding home exchanging, your contest and your speaking on CBC Radio.

Thank you for covering home exchanging so thoroughly. Getting more people familiar with this travel alternative benefits all the exchange clubs and exchangers (like ourselves).

We are passionate about home exchanging–so much so that in 2005 we started our own home exchange Website, 1stHomeExchange.com and EchangeVacances.com (French only).

If you haven’t exhausted the home exchange topic [note from Julie: I don't think it's possible], I’d like to let you know about our latest article that may be of interest to you and your readers:

66 Practical Home Exchange Tips:  A Complete Guide to Finding, Arranging, and Enjoying a Perfect Home Exchange Holiday

We’ve been working on this for a while and finally finished it. It covers the tips you included in your own article, Top 10 tips for a successful home exchange, plus much more.

(Incidentally, we loved your “Communicate, communicate, communicate” tip title. It complemented our own “Contact, contact, contact” tip that we were using with our own members and visitors. I’m using it in the article – hope that’s OK with you?  [Note from Julie: Sure is!])

It’s unfortunate we missed your blog over the last couple of weeks–we would have loved to participate and also provide a free premium membership for your contest. (OK, our membership fee is only CAD $75–not quite the cost of Intervac’s and HomeLink’s–but with over 16,000 homes in 130 countries it still makes for a pretty good prize!).

[Note from Julie: I think so too--and so I'm going to open this contest up one more time...

Another chance to win a home exchange membership

Everyone who entered the previous contests will have another shot at winning a one-year home exchange memberhip with 1stHomeExchange, and anyone who missed out on those first contests will have until April 15 to enter. And if you retweet this contest on Twitter or blog about it with a link back, I'll give you a second entry!

Best of all, this is a border-free contest--anyone in the world can enter this time.

Just leave a comment below telling me why you want to do a home exchange...]

(Note: I haven’t used any of these services yet myself, but I’ve heard good buzz from other travellers…so far, no axe murderers it seems…)

Airbed & Breakfast

How it works: This is like bunking at a friend’s house: in return for a small fee, you get a bed for the night–and it might be nothing more than an air mattress–and breakfast in the morning. It can be unbelievably cheap: someone in Calgary was recently offering to host an overnight guest for a mere $10. According to the site, you can currently find a bed in 792 cities in 72 cities.

Good to know: Hosts post photos of their digs at the site, and both hosts and guests can post feedback after a stay.

Help Exchange

How it works: This free service lets you swap labour for room and board at farms, ranches, lodges, hostels and even sailing boats. You might, for example, give a hand with the planting at an organic farm in Quebec, or help with the housekeeping at a B&B on one of BC’s Gulf Islands.

Good to know: Make no mistake, you’re signing up for a working holiday. But you probably won’t be expected to muck in for more than a few hours each day and you can stay for several months.

Roomorama

How it works: This is so called peer-to-peer rentals: locals in nine North American cities, including Toronto and Vancouver, offer more than 1,000 places to put your head. Rates vary from a few bucks to a couple hundred, depending on whether you’re buying the use of a room, an apartment or an entire house.

Good to know: You’ll pay a small service charge (around $10 CDN) to the site, but you do get something for that: Roomorama won’t release the rental fee to the host after you’ve checked in. And you can “shout out” your wish-list on the site to request a room in a certain destination on certain days.

 Global Freeloaders

How it works: This one came on to my radar while I was clicking through various links on my pal Laura Byrne Paquet’s excellent live-like-a-local blog. It’s a completely free service that’s as easy as:

1. Sign up.

2. Introduce yourself to, and request accommodation from, the other people registered on the site. (The site collects and forwards your e-mail–sort of like it works with Craigslist.) It’s an international site, so you can search by country and city for listings.

and

3. Sit back and wait for a reply.

Good to know: This service relies on “a balance of give and take” according to the site–so if you’re not prepared to return the hospitality within six months of signing up, you’re strongly urged to reconsider. When posting, be as specific as possible about what you’re prepared to offer a guest: just a bed for a couple of nights? the grand neighbourhood tour? an open-fridge policy?The goal here is hospitality, not hurt feelings…

Couchsurfing

If I’m reading this volunteer-run site right, it appears there are currently (March, 2009) more than 33,000 Canadian couches just waiting for you to crash on them. (And if you’re looking for a couch in Africa, there are some there too.) Thanks to Pam Mandel at NerdsEyeView for flagging this site for me. 

How it works: Same as the others models–register your couch, or your intention to couchsurf, then go cruise the site for connections.

Good to know: Unlike the other sites, Couchsurfing apparently has a system for verifying its hosts. Basically, it works on the friends-of-friends model–I can vouch for Sue and Sue can vouch for Bob and Bob can vouch for Ranjit and Ranjit can vouch for you–so you must be a good person. They call it “a trust circle.”

And hey, if you’ve had experiences with any of these sites, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d share your comments here…

Twitter Early Access (in advance of Travelzoo launch on 3/18/09) – $101 room rates at The Fairmont Empress -http://tinyurl.com/empress101

If you’re tempted, don’t dither. This special package will hit TravelZoo on Wednesday…

So I went looking for the catch in the “20/20 Celebration Sale” that’s getting underway tomorrow at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler……and I kept looking……but there wasn’t one.

Starting February 25 at 12:01 am Pacific time, the grande dame of Whistler’s hotel scene will offer 20 rooms every day for the rest of 2009 at just $99. And even better: they’re not kidding when they say every day–there are no blacked out dates for this amazing offer: Christmas is included.

I attended the official opening of this toney property 20 years ago and have returned many times over the years–sometimes on their dime but more often on mine. It’s one of those rare hotels that never wavers in quality or customer service; it manages to add new amenities without cutting back on quality somewhere else.

I’m a huge fan of this hotel even though I’m not a skier. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever stayed there in the winter–I usually visit Whistler in the summer or early fall because I like to hike. The resort is a great fit for couples and families with different interests–one likes to golf, for example, the other likes to spa. But let’s be frank: family-friendly doesn’t always equate with budget-friendly. Until now.

Reservations open tomorrow at 12:01 am PST until Tuesday, March 3 at 11:59 pm PST at www.fairmont.com/whistler. Rates start at $99 CAD plus taxes for a moderate room and are based on a minimum two-night stay (trust me: one is not enough).  Full prepayment is required at time of booking and is non-refundable.

Now outta my way: I’ve got to get caffeinated so I can stay up ’til midnight…

Our enthusiasm for home exchange verges on the evangelical–we definitely want all our friends to see the light and join us on the path to budget-friendly travel that doesn’t involve the words “hostel” or  “shared bath”–charming though those things might be when you’re 20. We’re starting to get a lot of calls from friends (or friends of friends) wanting to know more about our experience and looking for advice. So here they are, my top 10 tips for a successful home exchange:

Adjust your trust:  The first question everyone always asks is, “Weren’t you worried about having a stranger in your house?” Yes, I was: for about five seconds. But think about it: is someone going to spend $130 bucks plus the cost of international airline tickets so they can rip you off? Not bloody likely. The people who go through the minor hassle of signing up with an exchange agency want what you want: an affordable vacation in an interesting part of the world. They’re not after your jewellery. Mutual trust is the bedrock of successful home exchange, so if you’re someone who doubts the essential goodness of humanity, you might want to book into a hotel instead.

Open the door to possibility: The French family that accepted our exchange offer last year had never even heard of Bowen Island when we approached them. It was never on their radar–but they were intrigued once we put it there. While it’s perfectly acceptable to zero in on a certain location for your exchange, I recommend that you leave your destination open when possible and let the world surprise you. Of course, it means you need to craft the description of your home and community with some care: you need to sell (but never over-sell) what your ‘hood has to offer. And don’t despair if you live in a little-known backwater: it could be someone’s idea of holiday heaven.

Remember your manners: Once you sign up with a home exchange agency, you are obliged to observe a few basic points of etiquette, the first and most important being: RSVP. It is exceedingly impolite to ignore an exchange request. I don’t know about the other agencies, but Homelink sends an alert advising that you have new mail, and also makes it easy to say no with a one-click “Thanks, but no thanks” button. And once you’ve committed to an exchange, it’s beyond rude to change your mind for a better offer. Sure, things can happen that necessitate a change of plans, but refer to point 1 and ask yourself how you’d feel if someone left you on the hook with $5,000 worth of airline tickets and nowhere to stay once you arrived. And just like your mom taught you, leave a note of thanks and even a small gesture like a bottle of wine at the end of your exchange.

Communicate, communicate, communicate: Talking helps build trust. Once you’ve started to dance with a potential home exchange partner, you will likely enjoy a steady stream of back-and-forth correspondence while you figure out whether your plans mesh. It’s during this uncommitted period that you really get a sense of the personalities involved. (We had one very strange correspondence with a person who we quickly determined we didn’t want to let anywhere near our lives, let alone our home.) Once you’ve committed to an exchange, you will likely share all sorts of contact info, including your personal e-dresses and cell phone numbers. Expect a flurry of communication–all those last-minute details–in the week or two leading up to the exchange.

Sign a contract: I don’t know about other agencies, but Homelink offers a handy on-line template for documenting your expectations and agreements about your home exchange. For example, since we have an excellent and inexpensive international long-distance plan, we agreed to let our French guests make long-distance calls on our home line to a maximum of $10, after which they would be required to reimburse us. Who knows if it would stand up in court, but it does help to clarify those messy details.

Write a book: This one is important. It’s time-consuming, but you only have to do it once: write the book about your home and community. Don’t take it for granted that your guests will know how to clean the lint trap on your ancient dryer or when to take the garbage can to the curb-side. We told our French guests where to find the trailhead to a favourite secret beach, where to buy organic vegetables, and who to call on for local advice; they told us how to save on transit costs by forgoing the tourist passes and buying a weekly Metro pass used by Parisian commuters. We both included local guidebooks, maps and tourism brochures in our “house books”. Keep the book on your computer so you can update it quickly for every exchange.

Clean to a higher standard: One man’s clean is another man’s clutter. Even if you’re not a natural neat-nik, you should become one for the few weeks before and during your home exchange. You don’t have to repaint your house or buy new furniture, but you do have to clean it to within an inch of its life: dust shelves and tables, wash floors, vacuum carpets, scrub sinks, toilets and tubs. (It’s also helpful to empty a drawer or two and make a little space in your bedroom closet for your guest’s clothes.) Make your house sparkle–and then make it clear to your guests that you’d like to find it exactly as you left it. Be specific about your expectations: we were asked to strip and remake the beds with fresh sheets before we left the Paris flat. We also swapped housekeeping services with our French family. If you have a housekeeper, consider asking them to continue during your time away; that way you’ll guarantee you’ll come home to a spic-and-span house.

Put your house in order: You know that funny burnt-rubber smell coming from the dryer these days? Or those rotten boards on the deck that threaten to collapse every time you use the barbecue? Now would be a good time to fix that stuff. You know you need to do it, and there’s nothing like a deadline–or the spectre of liability–to focus the mind.

Get insurance assurance: Talk to your insurance broker about your exchange plans. It shouldn’t be an issue given that most companies are happy to know that a house won’t be standing empty. If you’ve agreed to swap cars, your existing insurance should cover the guest driver, but check with your insurer. In our contract with our French family, we agreed that they would compensate us for the deductible and for any increase in our premiums if they had an accident. (They didn’t.) We also opted to pay a few extra dollars to Homelink for insurance that would cover us for expenses if our exchange fell through at the last minute and we had to pay for hotels and car rentals.

Park your expectations & pack your sense of humour: Essayist Pico Iyer says that when he travels he likes to read everything he can about his destination before he gets on the plane–and then to forget it all the minute he steps off. In my experience, the less you expect of your holiday the more satisfying it will be. Home exchange is particularly suited to the serendipitous traveller. Live like a local as much as you’re able, and you’re sure to stumble across surprises unknown to any guidebook.

Good luck and let me know your exchange experiences!