Home exchanges are booming on the internet. As long as you can persuade the owners that they want to stay in your home, you can stay in Costa Rican colonial-style house with a 64 Cherokee thrown in, a cabin in Alaska or a Manhattan loft completely free.
An exhaustive list of home exchange agencies specialising in swaps between older people, kosher homes, golfers, teachers, academics on sabbatical and more generalist services.
Fee £60-£129.
Chiefly Europe and North America. Claiming to have the largest home exchange database in the world, Intervac publishes paper directories of its properties three times a year. It also employs representatives in each country who act as a point of contact in case of any problems.
Fee £15; free hosting for new members.
Slightly less sophisticated than many of its rivals, but gives a better idea of how home exchanges work.
Fee £38-70.
Another British-based agency founded in 1985. It appears to host the same listings as gti-home-exchange.com, which has a lower fee of £20-50.
Fee $80.
Chiefly US and Canada. Formerly known as Mi Casa Su Casa, Gayhometrade arranges swaps between gay, lesbian and bisexual homeowners. Members seem to be particularly keen on staying in London, so if you live in the capital then the chances of a successful exchange are quite high.
Fee £25.
Fewer photos here and more prose. Owners have space to reveal their jobs and their cat's feeding requirements. Members are overwhelmingly English-speaking and tend to live in North America or Britain.
Fee £95.
Homelink was established in 1953 and has 12,500 members. The high quality of the listings here and the professionalism of the site goes some way to justifying the fee, which includes translations into six other languages to facilitate searches. It also produces draft agreements and evaluation forms to print out and fill in.
Fee $29.95.
Browsing these Florida-based listings is free and the owners' e-mails are included, so you can avoid paying a fee altogether if you can persuade one of the advertisers to swap with you. Great fun.
Fee $50+.
Latitudes Home Exchange also arranges "custom exchanges" (on the same principle as a dating service) if you pay $250 and provide written references.
Maintains a database of people willing to house-sit and usually look after pets. They supply a description of themselves and an e-mail contact. Listing yourself as a housesitter costs £19.
• Correction: In the column on foreign currency websites last week, we inadvertently printed the wrong address for Travelex (travelex.co.uk), which is why the page was inaccessible. Apologies to Travelex for the error.
