The new response rate evaluation is definitely a good step forward! 
We truly hope it will help reduce the frustration that many of us experience when trying to arrange an exchange. Right now, getting one positive answer often requires contacting 20 listings or more. It’s exhausting and disheartening. We have plenty of points, but every time we want to organize a trip, we feel overwhelmed by the time and energy it takes. It honestly feels like spamming — not only for us, but also for all the members who receive our messages and now feel even more pressure to respond.
To reduce this noise and inefficiency, I strongly suggest adding a filter option to show only members with “Excellent response” — or to optionally include those with “Good response” too. Being able to exclude the rest would significantly cut down the wasted time and improve the experience for everyone involved.
But I also believe the issue goes deeper than filters. The real challenge is deeper and systemic: too many inactive or slow-responding listings make it unnecessarily difficult to find an exchange, and this leads to a poor experience for both seekers (spammers) and those being contacted (spammed)
Here’s a long-term idea: introduce a recognition badge for highly committed members — similar to Airbnb’s “Superhost.” HomeExchange could have a “SuperExchanger” badge, automatically granted to members who maintain excellent response rates, calendar updated in the last x months, nice language in their chats, and 5-star reviews over time (e.g. a full year). And, as Airbnb, if you maintain this status for a year, you receive some gifts, in our case could be 200GP, for example.
This wouldn’t exclude anyone, as every member could strive for it, but it would allow active users to easily find and connect with others who are also deeply engaged and care about providing an excellent experience for the community.
With this system, we could filter listings by “SuperExchanger” status and confidently focus our efforts where there’s the highest likelihood of success. This would make the platform much more user-friendly, efficient, and recommendable.
Right now, we often hesitate to recommend HomeExchange to friends — not because we don’t love the concept (we do!), but because the process of finding a home is still too time-consuming and frustrating. Sometimes, we even end up booking an Airbnb, not for lack of points, but because it’s simply easier and pain free.
I think the platform needs to also solve the problem of members receiving many requests a week (in touristy cities) I think they should be able to prevent being contacted for selected dates that they’ve blocked in their calendar. This would make more efficient!
That said, it’s fantastic to see that the HomeExchange team is taking steps in the right direction. We really appreciate your work, and I hope this feedback can support your ongoing efforts to address the root of the problem — not just the symptoms. 