BoomerGirl Diary

New York — Hazel Clark wouldn't take family vacations in Europe if she hadn't discovered house swapping.

It isn't just the huge hotel bills that she, her husband and son would rack up. It's also that Jacob, their son, is only 10. Long stints in hotels aren't much fun for him.

But the Brooklynite belongs to a home exchange club, which allows her to search online for people who want to temporarily trade their places for her Park Slope rental in two floors of a century-old brownstone off Seventh Avenue.

House swapping — an increasingly common way to find free lodging — has been popular for decades, but the Internet has made it much easier. Home exchange clubs typically charge annual fees of less than $100; sites such as craigslist are free.

When Clark and her family went to western France last summer, she found a house — with a swimming pool — in Vertou, a charming small town outside Nantes.

"Home exchange gives you a different take on travel," said Clark, an art and design professor at Parsons. "You're living somebody else's life."

During their first swap three years ago, her family lived the life of California suburbanites at a place in San Luis Obispo, which came with a garden and a dog.

Jacob played with the neighborhood kids and loved the big Labrador retriever, since the family doesn't have a dog.

Clark first heard about house swapping thanks to a chance conversation with a colleague at a luncheon. The co-worker recommended HomeExchange.com as a reliable swap service, and Clark soon signed up.

No fewer than 600 of HomeExchange's listings are in metro New York, said company President Ed Kushins, a Californian whose parents grew up near Yankee Stadium. The site has more than 17,000 listings of homes in 100 countries.

"Along with Hawaii and Tuscany, New York City is one of the most sought after locales for home swappers," said Josh Jaffe, who runs another site, Intervac USA, with his wife, Jessica.

Launched in 1953 by a teachers' union in Sweden, Intervac has 10,000 members. About 80 percent are Europeans, while just 150 or so live in the New York area. Another service, HomeLink, has 225 of its 13,000 listings in metro New York.

Overseas or cross-country swaps are typically two weeks long. Short trips to nearby destinations cost about the same as staying home, Kushins said.

For longer vacations, a family of four can save about $2,500 a week, Jaffe said. They don't have to pay for a hotel, can cook meals at the home and may even get to use their host's car.

Despite the opportunity to save big bucks, house swapping is a distressing idea to some — especially those who can't stomach the idea of other people sleeping in their beds and using their stuff. "People ask, `Isn't it weird having a stranger in your house?' " Kushins said. "The reality is no one ever does a home exchange with a stranger."

Swappers get to know each other before handing over their house keys, he said. They correspond online, send photos and talk on the phone.

"It's a lot like Internet dating, which has come a long way," Kushins said. "And you can ask for referrals."

There's an added layer of protection for swappers who use members-only Web sites instead of free ones. Club operators keep records of members' names and credit card data.

"The likelihood of fraud is minimized," said Intervac's Jaffe. "I know who my members are."

Clark was cautious the first time she did a swap. She rejected the first two people who contacted her. "They didn't feel like a good fit," she said.

She got to meet the family from California — a single mom and two teenage sons — before they came to Park Slope, which was reassuring.

Since then, she has developed a routine for handing over her home. She leaves a bottle of wine, maps and a printed copy of helpful info about the house that she already e-mailed to her swap partners.

For the French family, she left lots of details about how to operate the washing machine, and stressed that recycling is the law in New York City.

"Home exchange is based completely on trust," she said. "We haven't had any bad experiences — thank goodness."

Home sharing, hollywood-style

What would you pay to have Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet promote your Web site?

Ed Kushins didn't dish out a dollar for priceless publicity from their 2006 movie, "The Holiday," which features his house-swapping site, HomeExchange.com.

New members have flocked to the site thanks to the film, in which Diaz's character searches the phrase "home exchange" on Google and winds up on it. She trades her place in Beverly Hills for a country cottage in England where Winslet's character lives.

Since "The Holiday" opened in December, the number of available homes listed on HomeExchange has swelled to 17,000 from 13,000.

When Columbia Pictures execs wanted Kushins' permission to depict the site in the film, they sent him the first 20 pages of the script. He read them very closely.

"I wanted to make sure it wasn't a slasher movie," Kushins said.