🥇Welcoming our first home exchange guests (while petsitting in France!) | #114
🥇Welcoming our first home exchange guests (while petsitting in France!) | #114
Playing the accommodation sharing platforms big style for mega savings
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Edition #115 is coming from Spain, I’m Ro and my bio is below. I post cool stuff on Linkedin and a regular free Newsletter: “Remote Work Digest”.
👋 Howdy loyal readers, hope everyone is keeping well!?
Thanks for opening this edition and swinging by! Nice to see you here.
Myself and my family recently finished off our summer in rural Castilla y Leon, in and around beautiful Salamanca, on a trip with some friends and it was lovely. Prior to that we were pet and housesitting again near La Rochelle in France. Over the start of September our daughter has gone back to school and we are all trying to get a bit of a routine going again, after a jam-packed summer. Our destination list looked like this:
Bali, Indonesia - Lombok, Indonesia - Jaca, Spain - Barcelona, Spain - Girona, Spain - La Rochelle, France and Salamanca, Spain
We did near on 9 weeks in total of travel and only paid for accommodation on about 2 weeks of all the trips. We played around and juggled the house sitting and home exchange (using guestpoints) platforms offers, also whilst using the “Genius” card one of the major booking platforms to keep our costs as low as possible.
Below is our daughter enjoying some purrfect time with our extended French family of four legged friends.
🐈 Curious about pet and house sitting, 🐶 Next step: Sign up to the biggest HouseSitting provider platform to get going!
Whilst in France, we got an enquiry for our first house guests from the home exchange platform, a family group from Catalonia were going to be visiting Zaragoza for a couple of days and wanted to use GuestPoints to stay in our apartment. So, as I confirmed and organised that guest visit - via a friend in Zaragoza - it dawned on me, that:
We were earning GuestPoints for our empty house on one platform in Spain, whilst staying in another place in France, for free - in exchange for pet sitting. The effort to learn and put time into these two ways of travelling more for less, really pays off!
It was a double whammy of benefits and made total nomading and travel financial sense.
Regular readers will know, that although we had staying in 2 other members houses ourselves, we had yet to welcome anyone to our home in Zaragoza (yet!). The time had arrived.
Our special home-base, which we were offering to others to enjoy, as part of the HomeExchange Platform (which you can view via that link, if you are already a member of the community).
New to the concept of House Swapping? Find out more or join below»»
♻️ Join HomeExchange as a member - use this link with my sponsor key.
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So with some help from some friends in Zaragoza, I co-ordinated remotely the preparation and welcoming of the guest family to our home. With a personal key exchange, clean sheets and all the essentials, plus a tour of the house and a gift left ready for them. They staying in contact via text message with me in France and it seemed to go smoothly.
I waited a little nervously for their final review after the stay and I was delighted to receive this 5 star review (translated from Spanish) below:
The HomeExchange platform rates each home swap experience on three criteria, which include Communication, Home Matches Description and Cleanliness. If you look above you can see, we got 5 stars in all categories. Hurrah!
What’s next? We are currently discussing our 2025 travel plans, open to opportunities as a family at various dates to house and pet sit. Particularly around Easter and Summer 2025. Travel planning is one of my most favourite things to do, so you will find me with a cheesy grin on my face for sure! :-)
👀 Stay tuned and any questions? Ask in the comments!
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 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