delight
Six nights in Toronto cost her $480, not a hotel
Two rents, one trip. Someone did the math.
Home swapping, the practice of trading houses with a stranger instead of booking a hotel, is back, driven by a cost-of-living crisis and a generation doing the math on paying rent in two places at once. Several clubs have sprung up to meet the demand. Kindred, founded in San Francisco in 2021 by Justine Palefsky and Tas Amina, now has 400,000 members who swap homes for credits rather than cash. The team says the average swap costs a tenth of a typical hotel stay. The idea is older than it looks. In 1953, New York teacher David Ostroff typed up a list of colleagues willing to exchange homes over the holidays, then printed 15,000 posters to recruit more. His first drive attracted 100 subscribers. Lydia Patel, who booked six nights in a Toronto home for $480, found the house full of character. She did struggle, she admitted, with trash day.
