We have lost a fixture in the world of home exchange. Organized home exchange clubs started in the 1950's. Teachers from the United States and Europe took advantage of their shared summers off and professional connection to trade homes for long vacations.
Recently, one of the original swap clubs announced the death of a major pillar of home exchange. The paper-and-ink, snail-mailed catalogue of swap homes is dead.
Your reaction may well be "huh?" Only old-time home exchangers like me will even remember this home exchange institution. The two oldest swap clubs used to create bound directories of their members' home listings. To save on postage, each member got to post one photo of the swap home, a list of dates when they would like to do a home exchange vacation, and a confusing line of incomprehensible icons or abbreviations representing amenities found in the listed home.
By the time these catalogues came out, once or twice per year, the listings were no doubt out of date. Using these paper listings was tedious. You could send letters requesting swaps to dozens of families. You might receive one response, and have to set up the swap based on that single letter from the swap family.
The internet changed this model. Suddenly we could email other exchangers, trading information and questions instantly or over the course of weeks or months. Web-based home exchange clubs allowed members to post photos of every room in the swap home. There was room for narrative descriptions of the home, the neighborhood and the family. Internet-based clubs allowed sortable searches for houses only, or for ever three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, or only for swap families with kids.
At first, owners of catalogue-based clubs insisted on their sites that their approach was better. Until recently, they still claimed that only a small percentage of home-owners outside of the United States had internet access. Considering that you can find an internet cafe everywhere from coastal Nicaragua to rural China these days, this excuse finally failed.
The catalogue-based clubs have modernized by slowly switching to the methods of the upstart internet-based clubs. They are now almost indistinguishable from modern swap clubs. As much as I hated the catalogues, they had their use. For one thing, they provided a directory to contact swappers one had exchanged with previously, whether or not they had renewed their membership.
If you happen to have a swap club catalogue, save it. This is the end of more than 50 years of history. Trees everywhere may thank us, but we will never again savor the excitement of paging through a thick book of free vacation homes. Rejoice and mourn. The swap club catalogue is well and truly dead.
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