Not all home exchangers perfectly embody the spirit of hospitality and responsibility all swappers prize. We returned from a non-simultaneous swap with a family who did not seem to demonstrate these qualities.
This couple seemed alright, if curt, over email and on the phone. In real life, however, they were extremely rude and dismissive. They had guests we hadn't agreed to within moments of arriving in our home. Since they were treating our home like a hotel before we even left we wondered what condition we would find it in on our return.
I had decided that if nothing was missing or broken I'd consider myself lucky and just chalk this up to the home exchange learning process. I didn't expect these folks to excel by leaving flowers, a gift or even a kind note. I just hoped they had done the bare minimum we expect from our swappers -- leave our home in as good or better condition and cleanliness than they found it. They had not made a good impression when they arrived but I could chalk that up to the stress of travel. Perhaps we'd be pleasantly surprised.
We weren't. Just as in a hotel, the swappers had left the house a mess. There was a pile of dirty -- and wet! -- towels and sheets in the foyer as soon as we walked in. Actually, "pile" didn't really describe the amount of laundry they left for us to wash. The exchangers themselves described it better in their note to us as "a mountain". As in, "sorry about the mountain of towels and sheets but" -- "but" what? I could not imagine the excuse any home exchanger could make for being unable to clean at the last minute.
Not everyone wants to clean on vacation (or before leaving their home for swappers). That's fine. As it turns out, there are companies and individuals who will actually come to your home and clean it in exchange for money. If these exchangers had known they would be unable to clean they could have asked us to schedule our cleaner to come in between their departure and our return. They did not, so an emergency must have come up that precluded their cleaning, right? A sudden attack of osteo-arthritis, being called away from vacation early due to a family illness, misplacing one's prosthetic arms -- these are all valid excuses for failing to clean an exchange home. Did our exchange partners have a good excuse like these?
No. As their note put it, "our plane leaves so early we have no time for cleaning". Holy cow. Surely these folks knew at least a few hours in advance when their plane was departing. In fact, they probably knew months in advance when they planned to stay at our place. So they never even considered cleaning our home. It wasn't that they ran out of time at the last minute -- the present tense used in the note shows they wrote it in advance of their departure.
There have been times when we had an early flight to catch. We put our kids to bed and did the heavy cleaning the night before our departure. The following morning we cleaned any messes we made as we went. This isn't ideal, but it's acceptable to most people. Our swap partners had not even made an effort to clean.
They seemed like terrible home exchangers and, indeed, they were. The mounds of dirty linens and the dirty apartment they left us was not the worst part of swapping with them. That was yet to come.
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