Travel Bargains

February 24, 2010 at 1:15 pm, by Margot Gilman

Some women do remarkable things with coupons. You’ve seen them profiled on TV: the ones who assiduously clip and file those little cents-off slips and then fill multiple supermarket carts to overflowing with groceries for something like $3.48. Personally, I think these women need to find something else to do with their time, but I understand the instinct. I’m driven by it too, but instead of food, I like my freebies to come in another form of sustenance: vacations.

In the last several years, my husband, two daughters and I have gone skiing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; we’ve visited Paris and Disney World and have spent winter breaks on white-sand beaches in Anguilla and Mexico. And not once have we paid for accommodations or airfare.  We’ve stayed in very nice places—usually condos or private homes or apartments. In Paris, we had a large one-bedroom flat with full hotel services near l’Opera. In Steamboat, a ski-on, ski-off two bedroom condo with an outdoor hot tub. In Disney, a 1600-square foot spread at a resort with 5 pools and two golf courses.  In Anguilla, an ocean-front, five-bedroom, five-bath villa that was magazine-beautiful. Jealous yet? This coming March we are going skiing in Squaw Valley, CA, where a very nice two-bedroom condo right at the base is waiting for us.

There’s no magic involved, and what we do just about anyone can. The airfare to and from all these places is free because we use our frequent-flyer miles to buy it. (My husband and I charge every conceivable purchase we make on the same single credit card that rewards us with air miles. One summer camp tuition payment and we’ve earned ourselves a plane ticket halfway to somewhere, we figure).

Free accommodations take a little more effort, and, some might say, a decent level of comfort with risk. We house swap.  I let people I don’t know from Adam stay at my place in New York in exchange. And not once has it been anything but the most gratifying and pleasant experience.

I’ve found house swaps through newspaper advertisements, through (gasp!) Craigslist postings, and also through an online home-exchange service called homeexhange.com. This is a fun site to visit even if you have no intention of ever house swapping. Think of some place in the world you’d like to see, say Santa Fe or Perugia or Fiji, type it in and check out the amazing houses you could stay at. The owners of these fabulous homes list places they’d like to visit, and their preferred travel times, and it’s up to you (or them) to search the listings and make a match. If you buy a membership to the service ($9.95 a month) people will be e-mailing you all the time. Putting a deal together has not been a problem, I’ve found. Then again, I live in New York City, a place many folks want to visit.

Homeexchange.com claims to have over 33,000 listings in more than 130 countries, and while there are certainly some unscrupulous home swappers out there, I have only dealt with courteous and gracious ones—people who’ve treated my home with respect and left it spotlessly clean.  Some of them have even gone on to become facebook friends with me. Nancy from Steamboat has a son who is soon to graduate from a New York college, and she recently wrote to see if my family would like to spend a long weekend hiking in Colorado in May. It occurs to me: The wildflowers will be in bloom then. Guess I’ll have to see about putting some free air miles together….