• Tell me a little about your family and who you travel with.
Hi, we are "the Kollers“, a family of 5, based in beautiful Austria.
My wife and I have been traveling a lot, than we settled down, built a house and got 3 kids.
Well, wasn’t quite in that order, everything was a bit mixed up ;-)
Everything was pointing to an "ordinary“ life, but we realised soon that this is not quite what we wanted for our (family) life.
Kids got older, decisions had to be made and all over sudden we were "homeschoolers“.
So why not start traveling again when school holidays don’t bother us?
My wife and I we are both self-employed, run our small businesses and we are both currently trying to set up our business in such a way that it works location independently. • Do you travel full time? How do you educate your children? Our house is our home base which we are quite happy to live in for a couple of months. Preferred from late spring until late fall. Traveling full time is not an option for us as at the moment as we can not imagine (yet) how life would change and transforms when leaving our house behind. We educate our kids at home (which is possible in Austria, but at the end of school year we have to pass an exam) First 2 years of primary school we did „unschooling“ believing kids learn and teach themselves everything they need in a normal life, based on the „inner curriculum“ of kids, family, love and trust. Now, we have to decide weather we continue unschooling. But exams get tougher and contents differs a lot from what we consider necessary for a self-determent life, or we go on with homeschooling trying to make our kids learn exactly what teachers want them to "perform“ for the exams. • What are your main reasons for house swapping? When my wife was in childbed with our 3rd child, she got the feeling that we need to spread out again and explore the world. (we own a VW-camping-van so she had the idea to travel for a few weeks through Europe) I thought that would be a brilliant idea, but I wasn’t quite convinced about using the car. When we traveled before we got kids, we changed location everyday to see us much as possible. After our first trip with our kids we soon figured out that we need to change that approach immediately ;-) Since that moment we are "slow traveling“ and house swapping just fits perfectly to that concept! • How many have you done? Where have you been? So far we have done 4 exchanges. It all started when we tried to arrange consecutive swaps in Scandinavia. We failed, it didn’t work out. All over sudden we were offered a 7-week-exchange from a French family who’s woman is original from one of our hometowns before she moved to the Provence. She wanted to spend some time with her family near her parents place. So we ended up in their house in the Provence for 7 weeks. For us it was the most perfect house to start the "sharing-experience“. Small, no fancy-architecture and expensive furniture, with a fenced pool and all on one floor. Something we haven’t considered but at this time our youngest was a toddler and any stairs would have been something extra to keep an eye on. The pool was completely safe so we did not have to worry of any of our 3 kids who couldn’t swim at that time. • Tell us about your favourite swap ever? Every swap is different so they are very hard to compare. But to be honest, so far we enjoyed Thailand most. Why? Well, I would say because it was so different to the way we normally live. • How far in advance do you organise your travels? Most of the time we get contacted by other house swappers around half a year in advance. It does feel a bit strange when you have to make decision where you want to go in summer and it is snowing outside … but we got used to that. As soon as we get an enquiry we try to find out as much as possible about the potential future house-swap. Does the country and the house fit to us? Do we want to stay there for a while? What does the climate chart say? Can we find it on google maps? (Are there any houses (kids) around or is it isolated?) Is there public transport? An airport nearby? • Best swapping tip? You’ve got kids? Always swap with families! We try to find families with kids about the same age as ours – that helps a lot. The have toys according to the age, maybe a child-seat for the bikes (great, we don’t have to bring ours along), bikes for the kids, … • How much money do you reckon you have saved on travel accommodation by swapping homes? It is hard to say, but just look up what houses in Thailand, France, Netherlands cost to rent for 1-2 months. Of course, rent isn’t everything. Transport sums up to quite an amount. When we do exchanges within Europe, we take our camping-can to keep costs low. • What other accommodations do you like to stay in when you are not swapping? We normally only stay in our camping-van our in swap-houses. We really try to avoid hotels as much as possible as we want to follow our own daily routines rather having to eat at certain times, … We might give"woofing“ a try and traveling for some months with a camping-truck. • What one thing do you travel with that you use to make other peoples homes feel like yours? When we travel within Europe, we bring all our bed-sheets along. Kids feel home where ever their favorite set of bed-sheet is. We also bring along the kids bikes. • What would you say to other people considering this type of travel accommodation? You cannot possible imagine anyone sleeping in your bed, eating of your plate, drinking out of your cup? Than you should better check in a hotel ;-) You will only have a great time in someone else house if you stop thinking about yours. • People say they like to Swap homes rather than stay in a hotel as it feels more like a ‘home from home’ - Does it really? Can you really make someone else home feel like your own? How do you achieve this? When traveling, I don’t want to stay in my home. So why should I make someone else home feel like mine ;-) Of course we try to set us up in such a way that we can connect to the place easily. We normally put all mattresses on the floor and sleep in one big family-bed. Like at home. That helps a lot. • Tell me what you do in preparation for your swapper staying in your home? Do you clear a wardrobe for their clothes? Put your valuables away for safe keeping. Do you worry about your own home while you are in someone else’s? We normally do an intense cleaning on our house. We believe that our swap partners will leave our house behind the way they have experienced it when entering it for the first time. We have also a very detailed written house manual which we updated after every swap. As we only do longterm-exchanges we believe that no-one wants to live „out-of-their-suitcases“. So for us it is pretty normal to clear the wardrobe and provide a shelf in the bathroom. We have one room that will be locked during the swap and in that room all our private belongings go. (when we did the first exchange, the room was full, now we hardly put anything in there anymore) • So where to next? Any more swaps planned. Of course, we are addicted to it and it brings us closer to the world without having to spend an awful lot of money! All the best for your future swaps!
Uli and the rest of the family
Thanks to Uli for giving us an insight into his swapping adventure!
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