🎁 2025 travel savings & GuestPoints | #123 | December 2024
cheaper family travel plans for 2025
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👋 Hey we have 2,072 GuestPoints!
Thanks for opening this edition and swinging by! Nice to see you here. 🫖 Welcome new subscribers. Edition #123 is coming from Zaragoza, our base location. We have done some local travelling over recent weekends, visiting the Pyrenees and spending this last weekend in Madrid, visiting friends.
»Comments are open on this post, if you would like to share or ask questions.
This time I share about some of our family travel planning for 2025 using the HomeExchange guest points we have accumulated over recent months from welcoming guest to our apartment in Zaragoza when we are travelling.
We have accumulated over 2k GuestPoints in recent months and for us - a family obsessed with travel - that means LOTS of travel planning fun!
♻️ Join HomeExchange as a member - use this link with my sponsor key and you get an extra 250 GP for being referred by me ✨
🏡 What is House Swapping?
Over this past year, I have been writing regularly on home swapping as after a friend sponsored us to join the platform, we started booking stays with our initial balance of GuestPoints. That started my sharing on here about how the we were benefiting from this new (and cheaper way!) of finding travel accommodation solutions.
A quick recap:
Back in June, I wrote my first post on the experience, after spending a magical weekend in the Spanish Pyrenees.
In a later post, in September, I covered off all the advantages of using this way of sharing homes to support more travel and also to support the environment.
Since joining in May 2024, in 8 months, we have stayed in various places around Spain and welcome 7 guest stays to our home.
First, I will share on our travel locations using HomeExchange GuestPoints for 2025. Later I will explain how we gained those GuestPoints to enable all the travel we are planning!
🗓️ 2025 destinations with GuestPoints
For now, we have used about half of our points. Securing 18 days in and around Spain - with one location being very near to Northern Portugal, which we will visit also.
🤑 18 nights lodging equates to around €2,700 savings in fees.
Summary of our already planned trips:
Snow fun: in January in the Spanish Pyrenees.
We are using some points to spend a few days in the snow; snowboarding and skiing about 2 hours north of Zaragoza near Formigal. The picture below is from one of the ski slopes in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Easter 2025: visiting Granada and on the beach in Andalusia
The school holidays over Easter are around a week, so we will drive south in Spain, to catch some sun!
Summer 2025: exploring Galicia and the North of Portugal during August.
A generally very expensive time to travel, however using GuestPoints we have found a nicely located apartment in coastal Galicia and only half an hour from the Portuguese border for easy day trips.
Most HomeExchange accounts start with a balance of credit with GuestPoints, so regardless of if you never (ever!) list your own house or accept guests to your home, you can explore and start using yours to travel.
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🔢 How we earned those GuestPoints
Here is the breakdown of how we got to our current total of GuestPoints.
Initial listing on the platform
You get a balance usually of GuestPoints for joining the platform, then later, as you add and list your own property, more points are accrued.
Referral earnings
From the above image, you can see that I earned extra points via a friend referral to the platform (thanks Theo!). Later, this also works for me to invite and refer contacts and friends, using my referral link, that looks like this: https://www.homeexchange.com/?sponsorkey=ro-1a79b.
I also share this link often on this Newsletter and in other places:
♻️ Join HomeExchange as a member - use this link with my sponsor key and you get an extra 250 GP for being referred by me ✨
We earned Sponsor badges and more points using the referral scheme way, as people took up the offer. 3 people have done so, resulting in an extra GuestPoints.
Welcoming guests to our home to earn
Then as we share our own home when we go away, we gain points too!
In recent months we have welcomed various guests to earn points and subsequently, we also (fingers crossed!) gained positive recommendations.
The image below show how opening up our home and welcoming guests pays off.
Afterwards, those guests write positive reviews all of this has a compounding impact to gain us more enquires and bookings. Below, you can see a selection of positive reviews (in Spanish as our listing is written in English & Spanish!) also.
I think over 8 months this is not a bad effort. It really is about consistency and the impact of compounding efforts!
The savings are incredible, even my husband is blown away!
What is stopping you using HomeExchange?
Any doubts, share them below!
TLDR: 🫱🏽🫲🏾 In case you don’t know me already, I am Ro, I am based in Zaragoza, Spain with my Location Independent, somewhat Nomadic (4-6 months a years of nomading) family. For work, I am a Remote Work and Digital Nomad Expert, Advisor and Writer, oh and a Linkedin Top Voice.
»You can book a 1:1 video mentoring session with me here.
All my web and FREE resource links are here.
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May the road rise to meet you,
love n light,
💚 Ro