Word: home
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will your swap leave you feeling so good about it? "It's very intimate being in someone else's home and life," says Lori Horne, who was an avid swapper before she bought the Intervac network 10 years ago. But intimacy can cut both ways. While your guests have their feet up on your ottoman, gazing at the photographs of your children, sipping coffee from your "World's Greatest Dad" mug, you may be frantically calling home to ask why their washing machine keeps spinning your clothes but never wets them. (They have thoughtfully left the instructions out, but they...
...both cases, it helps to deal through a reputable home-exchange network like HomeLink or Intervac, which are the largest and have been around for 40 years. There are also a growing number of newer exchange services cropping up on the Internet. For an annual fee, usually under $100, your home or apartment is listed by location with a brief description of its amenities and occupants. You can also note the cities or countries you would like to visit and the times of the year you would like...
...Olga Bowe let the demand for their Chicago home drive their schedule. People who had left the Windy City and wanted to return to visit family just flocked to them. The Bowes did their first exchange with a Cincinnati family about nine years ago. Why Cincinnati? No special reason, Olga giggles. They got an offer; it was close; they thought they would try it. Since then, they've taken their two kids to homes in San Diego, Toronto, London--and twice to Orlando, where they swap with Floridians Jan and Stuart Omans...
...Omanses, for their part, trade for both flexibility and the unexpected rewards of the exchange system. Several years ago, they wanted to follow a planned visit to their grown children in Boston with a vacation in Vermont. They contacted a Colorado woman, Joanna Lyn Merriman, who had a second home in Vermont. The timing wasn't convenient for Merriman, who banked the swap and eventually transferred her "credit" to her best friend, whose husband was in the last stages of cancer. "They stayed 10 days," Jan Omans recalls, "and after he died, his wife wrote that her husband had wanted...
Relax, say most veterans. The vast majority of exchangers are home-owning professional people like doctors, professors and business owners. About 40% are repeat exchangers, so it's easy to get references from others with whom they have stayed. Of the very few problems he has seen in the 10 years he has run HomeLink, Karl Costabel says, "most of them are trivial." To avoid worry, Costabel recommends locking up valuable or fragile items or taking them to a friend's house. "We have had no lawsuits in 10 years," says Intervac's Lori Horne, "and the few complaints...