PARIS — Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, New York, Montreal… Nelly, a lawyer in her 40s, her husband and their two daughters have never traveled as much as they did last year. “In one year, we did what we would normally have done in four because of the accommodation budget,” she says. Her secret? In each of these cities, the couple found a family on HomeExchange who would lend them their home for free in exchange for theirs in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, or agreeing to receive points for booking another destination at a later date.
Nelly isn’t the only one using this exchange platform to organize almost all of her vacations. In two years, the number of HomeExchange subscribers has doubled to more than 200,000, with three quarters of them in France, Spain, the United States, Canada and Italy. And revenues have soared by 45% in one year, to 33 million euros (about $36 million).
Targetting 20 million users
This is still a negligible number compared to Airbnb’s 5 million hosts and billion in sales, but it still makes the French company the world leader in this niche of the collaborative economy, with an 80% market share. Above all, 15 years after founding the company, Emmanuel Arnaud is convinced that it can become even 100 times bigger: “20 million users is less than the number of people registered on [France’s main carpooling platform] Blablacar alone!” says the creator of GuestToGuest, as the website was originally called before it bought its American competitor, HomeExchange, in 2017 and took on that name.
It all started in 2010, when Arnaud, then executive from solar panel manufacturer First Solar, had a frustrating first experience with HomeExchange. “I contacted almost all the members who lived in Florence. Their homes were available on my dates, but they all told me they didn’t want to spend New Year’s Eve in Paris. My wife and I ended up using lastminute.com. I thought it was stupid: If there had been a points system, I could have stayed at one of those Florentines’ homes, and they could have gone somewhere other than Paris.”
Traveling without breaking the bank.
The idea seemed obvious to this graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and HEC Paris Business School. Although he had never done a home exchange, he filed the paperwork to create GuestToGuest. This Parisian, who grew up “with his parents always hosting a student into their spare room,” was convinced that he could reinvent the concept, which first appeared in the 1950s.
At the time, American, Swiss and Dutch teachers, eager to travel without breaking the bank during their long summer vacations, began exchanging their homes, giving birth to the HomeLink and Intervac networks. In the early 1990s, Californian Ed Kushins renewed the idea with HomeExchange, a paper catalog later replaced by a website.
A points-based system
Arnaud’s GuestToGuest differentiated itself from other websites with a system that goes beyond simultaneous exchanges: You earn points when you host someone and spend them when you go to someone else’s home. The number of points depends on the proximity of your property to a tourist destination, the presence of certain amenities (garden, swimming pool, etc.) and the number of beds.
“This last element is the most valued, because hospitality comes first: It takes much less effort to prepare a studio apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower than an apartment in the Paris suburbs for 10 people,” says Alice Lorenz, the site’s product manager.
GuestToGuest also adopted the codes of the rental industry, requiring users to take out insurance, pay a deposit and verify their identity, which was not the case on HomeExchange. This also enabled the company to earn a commission on these services. Arnaud rejected the idea of a subscription fee, which he sees as a brake on user growth.
Airbnb is also less and less in tune with travelers’ desire for authenticity.
Two years after its creation, the site was still struggling to get off the ground. Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, co-founder of adtech company Criteo and Arnaud’s wife’s cousin, kept telling him that he should find a partner. Arnaud ended up having “a professional crush” on Charles-Edouard Girard on a matchmaking site for entrepreneurs.
The duo has become one of the start-up’s strong points. “The two have very different personalities, therefore extremely complementary, challenging each other,” says HR Director Edouard Mouillon. Arnaud and Girard were also aligned on an aggressive external growth strategy. Taking advantage of market fragmentation, they bought the British company Itamos, the French Trampolinn, the Spanish HomeForHome and even grabbed the market’s No. 1, the American HomeExchange, in 2017.
“The founders were 70 years old and the site was only growing at 5% a year,” says Arnaud, who nevertheless describes several months of negotiating over the price.
“More respectful than Airbnb customers”
After the merger, the new HomeExchange juggled between two business models, confusing users, before instituting a 160-euro annual subscription in 2019. “This allows for repeats and the creation of a real community. But now people subscribe once they have found an exchange, whereas with the old HomeExchange, that was the first step of the registration process,” Arnaud says. Clever, so as not to discourage the curious — of which there are many thanks to word-of-mouth.
The feedback is generally positive. Of 45 exchanges in three years, Laura Désert, the owner of a charming house on the banks of the Vilaine River in Brittany, reports only one negative experience: Furniture was damaged and she was not informed. She finds the guests much more respectful than customers on Airbnb, the website she previously used to rent out her house. “They thought they were staying in a hotel,” she says.
Local authorities see the advantage over Airbnb.
“About 99.5% of ratings are positive. Less than 0.3% of exchanges result in the deposit being used, and in most cases it’s only 30 euros for a broken vase,” Arnaud says.
As a result, the subscription renewal rate exceeds 85%. The company is also winning over new customers thanks to a favorable economic climate. With inflation on the rise, travelers are looking for cheaper alternatives. Especially because renting on Airbnb now costs almost as much as a hotel, with ever-increasing fees.
Airbnb is also less and less in tune with travelers’ desire for authenticity, as the majority of accommodations are no longer the owners’ primary residence; they’re bought by investors to be rented out. Finally, the number of rentals in major cities, such as New York and Amsterdam, has fallen due to stricter regulations in recent years. In Barcelona, the city even decided to ban all seasonal rentals by the end of 2028.
A solution to overtourism?
But these new rules generally don’t apply to home exchange. “Local authorities see the advantage over Airbnb: HomeExchange doesn’t disrupt local real estate because you’re not going to buy an apartment specifically to put it on exchange,” says Mohamed Abdesslam, member of the company’s Board of Directors.
But there is one exception: The city of Amsterdam has included exchanges in the activities it regulates since 2024, with the first checks scheduled for March. HomeExchange convinced the city to exclude reciprocal exchanges, but exchanges made using points, members have to pay 71 euros for an annual license. And they can’t host guests for more than 30 days a year.
Was it this setback that prompted the company to hire a public affairs director? Since September, Anthony Ferreira has been responsible for presenting the platform as a solution to overtourism. “HomeExchange doesn’t lead to overcrowding when people go on vacation, because a person in their studio exchanges with another person in their studio. And people go to the bakery and the butcher’s on the corner, whereas Amsterdam’s problem is this amount of coffee-shops and shops that don’t serve the locals at all,” Ferreira says.
Another priority is simplifying the booking process.
Nevertheless, HomeExchange adds visitors to iconic sites, such as Paris’ Louvre museum and Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade. And by removing one of the main economic deterrents to travel, this system is causing some people to binge. “Home exchange has become a way of life for some people: Thousands of members, often remote workers or empty nesters, are racking up more than a hundred exchange nights a year,” Arnaud says.
Concerned about the environment, the team is “looking for ideas to raise travelers’ awareness of their carbon footprint, without making them feel too guilty,” says Impact Manager Elisa Papin. These include promoting destinations that are accessible by train, or rethinking the way points are awarded, for example by placing less value on the presence of air conditioning and more on proximity to public transport.
Kindred, the new competitor
Another priority is simplifying the booking process. On HomeExchange, you need to talk to several members, often at length, to get the job done — which stands in contrast to the immediacy of our times. This is an obstacle to the company’s growth in the United States, which is not as strong as in Europe.
“Americans don’t have many vacations, so they want to be sure they don’t screw up. But at HomeExchange, we still have that artisanal touch,” Arnaud says.
It’s a niche exploited by a new Californian competitor: Kindred, which has raised more than million, notably from Andreessen Horowitz, the famous venture capital fund that financed Airbnb. “We coordinate the cleaning before and after each stay to remove any uncertainty about the state of the accommodation,” says Justine Palefsky, co-founder of Kindred, which appeals to a target group of millennials and Gen Z, while HomeExchange is more popular with families and people in their 50s.
Another competitor is Texas-based ThirdHome, the leader in the luxury home sector. “On a site like HomeExchange, the owners of a very beautiful house will receive a flood of requests, but the proposals in exchange won’t tempt them. They deserve to be treated separately,” says Arnaud, who launched his own offering, Collection, four years ago.
The inventory is only 2,000 properties, 10 times fewer than on ThirdHome. But with a subscription fee five times higher than the classic plan, Arnaud expects that this market sector will account for a quarter of his sales in a few years’ time.
