I would love to hear about your experience with long-term home exchanges. Iām not referring to reciprocal exchanges, as those are straightforward. Instead, Iād like to ask about exchanges for a month or more using guest points.
In your experience, does the guest point value of a home remain the same for both short-term and month-long stays? Or have you received discounts or noticed different principles applied when calculating guest points for long-term exchanges?
I would truly appreciate any advice or insights from your own practice.
In my opinion, the definition of a ālong-termā exchange is more like 2 weeks or more, rather than a month. I believe that there are very few Guest Point exchanges of one-month or more. I believe that, except for the members who have very desirable homes in very popular destinations who are free to take long vacations, relatively few members would have enough guest points in the bank to offer a month-long stay to a host, and relatively few members are willing to offer their home for a month or more to a GP guest. You may find it difficult to find any members who have experienced this and would be able to respond to your post.
We have over 65 exchanges, are enthusiastic supporters of the GP philosophy, and advertise that we are open to long-term exchanges; however we have only experienced one long -term GP exchange by your definitionā¦ they are difficult to find as either host or as guest. I am not referring to reciprocal long-term exchangesā¦ I believe that these are somewhat more common than GP long-term exchanges.
For the one-month GP exchange that we experienced as a Guest, our host did generously and kindly reduce the GP rate of their home by about one-third. Although we have never had a GP guest stay at our home for as long as a month, we will typically offer a discount of our GP rate for any stay over 2-weeks during a popular period (July-August for our home), or over 1-week for a less popular period. We have offered these discounts on many occasions to guests. I believe it is a win-win for both host and guestā¦ the host has less cleaning and house-prep to do (e.g. one guest party for 3 weeks versus 3 guest parties for 1 week each), and the guest gets a discount on a stay of longer than a week. We have a washer and a dryer machine available to guests as well as cleaning supplies. We believe in the āleave the home as you found it policyā so we do not charge any cleaning feesā¦ we clean and prep the house thoroughly before our guests arrive, and during their stay at our home they are responsible for any cleaning they deem necessary for their stay and we expect them to reset our home to the clean condition they found it on arrival. If they cannot do that because of time constraints, we do usually ask for a cleaning fee.