Terms of Service

1. What Home Swap Club is

Home Swap Club is a membership community that introduces homeowners to one another so they can arrange home swaps directly between themselves. We provide the listings, the search and the private messaging. We do not arrange, broker, book, insure or supervise any swap.

Any swap you agree is a private arrangement between you and the other member. We are not a party to it. We do not guarantee that a swap will happen, or that a home will be as described.

2. Membership and eligibility

• You must be at least 18 years old.
• You must have the right to offer the home you list, as owner or with the permission of the owner. Check your lease, mortgage terms, building rules, homeowners’ association rules, local short-stay regulations and insurance before you list.
• One account per person. Accounts are not transferable.
• You are responsible for keeping your password secure.

3. Fees

Membership is CA$99 per year. The first 500 members receive their first year free; membership then continues at CA$99 per year unless cancelled. We take no commission on swaps and charge no booking fees. Members do not pay each other nightly rates through Home Swap Club.

Sales tax or VAT is added where the law where you live requires it. The total, including any tax, is shown on the payment page before you confirm, so the amount you agree to is the amount you are charged.

Payments are handled by Stripe, through its Link service, which is the seller of record for your membership. In plain terms: Stripe takes the payment, works out and remits the tax for your country, and pays us. It changes nothing about what you get, what it costs, or your right to a refund, which still comes from the button on your account page. We say it here because you are entitled to know who your money goes to.

One practical consequence. The charge appears on your card statement as LINK.COM* HOMESWAPCLUB, not as Home Swap Club, because the statement carries the name of the seller of record rather than ours. We cannot change it. We tell you before you pay, again in your confirmation, and again in the reminder we send before every renewal, so that an unfamiliar name on a statement is never the first you hear of it. A refund comes back from the same name.

Memberships renew automatically unless cancelled before the renewal date. You can cancel at any time from your account page, without contacting us. Cancelling stops the renewal: nothing further is charged, and you keep everything you have paid for, including your published home, until the end of the period you have already paid for. We email you before each renewal so a charge is never a surprise.

4. The 30 day guarantee

If Home Swap Club is not what you hoped for, ask for your money back within 30 days of paying and we will refund it in full. You do not need to give a reason and you do not need to talk to anyone: there is a button on your account page. The money goes back to the card you paid with, and your bank usually takes five to ten working days to show it.

We chose 30 days rather than the 14 that consumer law requires in some places because two weeks is not long enough to judge this. You need time to publish your home, write to a few people and see who writes back.

The first 14 days have no conditions at all. Consumers buying at a distance in the EU and the UK have a legal right to withdraw within 14 days, for any reason or none, and that right cannot be signed away. We apply it to everyone rather than working out where you live in order to decide how fairly to treat you. So inside 14 days the two conditions below simply do not apply: you press the button and you get your money back.

From day 15 to day 30 the guarantee is ours rather than the law’s, and two conditions come with it.

• Once you have arranged a swap, the money stays. If you and another member have both confirmed a swap, the membership has done the thing you paid it to do. You can still stop it renewing.
• The guarantee is one per person. Not one per account. If you have taken it before, you are welcome to join again, but you will be paying to stay. We keep a record for this purpose only, and it holds no information that could identify you: see the Privacy Policy.

Either way, a refund ends the membership straight away. Unlike cancelling, you do not keep access to the end of the year, and your home comes out of search at once.

Each renewal gets its own 30 days. If a renewal goes through and you had meant to stop it, ask within 30 days and we will give it back.

One thing we do reserve. Because the 14 day right cannot be limited, we keep the right to decline to sell you a new membership if you have taken your money back more than twice. That refuses a future sale, which is ours to refuse. It never touches a refund you are entitled to.

5. Your listing and your content

• Describe your home honestly and keep the details current.
• Only upload photos you have the right to use, showing the home you are actually offering.
• Do not publish your street address publicly. Share precise details privately, once you are comfortable with the other member.
• You keep ownership of what you upload. You grant us a licence to display it on Home Swap Club for as long as your listing is published.

6. Conduct

You agree not to:

• Misrepresent yourself, your home, or your intentions.
• Harass, threaten or discriminate against other members.
• Use the platform to advertise paid accommodation or other services.
• Scrape, copy or resell member data.
• Attempt to interfere with the security of the site.

Our Community Guidelines form part of these terms.

7. Suspension and removal

We may hide a listing, suspend an account or remove a member where we reasonably believe these terms or the Community Guidelines have been broken, or where doing so protects the community. Where practical we will tell you why.

8. Insurance

Most home insurance policies say something about who may occupy your home while you are away, and a home swap may not be covered by default. Some insurers treat a guest who is not a paying tenant differently from one who is; some require notice; some exclude it altogether. This is not a formality and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong.

The gaps insurers most often point to are theft while someone else is in the home, damage done deliberately rather than by accident, and your guest’s own belongings, which a homeowner’s policy will not usually cover at all.

Ask your own insurer, in writing, before you agree a swap, and ask the other member to do the same. We are not able to advise on your policy and we do not provide any cover of our own.

8.1 Your representation. You are solely responsible for obtaining and maintaining valid homeowners’, renters’, or equivalent insurance covering your residence throughout the duration of any Exchange, including coverage for damage, theft, and third-party injury. This insurance must remain valid and in force for the full duration of any Exchange. Confirming an Exchange or publishing a listing constitutes your representation that such insurance is in place. Home Swap Club is not a party to, and assumes no responsibility for, your insurance coverage or any claim arising from its absence.

Before you can publish your home or confirm a swap we ask you to tick a box confirming this, and we record the date you did. We do not ask for a policy number, we do not see your policy, and we do not check that it is still in force later. That is deliberate: checking would mean holding ourselves out as having checked, and we would rather tell you plainly that we have not.

9. Our role, and its limits

Section 1 says what we are in a sentence. This section says exactly where our part ends, because that is the thing most likely to matter if something goes wrong. It is written plainly rather than in legal language, and it is meant literally.

What your membership buys is a directory of other members’ homes, the ability to be found in it, and a private way to write to each other. That is the whole of the service. Specifically, and without exception:

• We are not a party to any swap. A swap is an arrangement between two members. We do not make it, approve it, witness it or enforce it.
• We take no booking and hold no money between members. There is no reservation, no deposit, no payment and no escrow passing through us. The membership fee is the only money involved anywhere, and it buys the directory, not a stay.
• We do not inspect, visit, photograph or assess any home. Every word and every picture in a listing was put there by the member who owns it.
• We do not vet members. We confirm that an email address works before a home can be published, and we act on reports. That is the extent of it. We do not check identity documents, run background or credit checks, verify ownership of a home, or confirm that anyone is who they say they are. Nothing on this site should be read as us vouching for a member.
• We provide no insurance, guarantee, deposit protection or compensation scheme of any kind, and we do not act as anyone ’s agent.
• We do not guarantee that a swap will happen. Members are free to say no to each other for any reason or none.

It follows that what happens between members is between members. Deciding whether to trust someone, agreeing what is included, sorting out keys, cleaning, pets, bills, damage, cancellation and everything else is yours to do. We strongly suggest you write down what you have agreed and keep it. If a swap goes wrong, your claim is against the other member, not against us.

10. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law where you live does not allow us to limit or exclude. If any part of this section is unenforceable, the rest of it still applies.

Subject to that:

• We are not liable for the acts or omissions of any member, or for anything that happens in the course of a swap. This includes damage to a home or its contents, theft, injury, cancellation at short notice, a home that turns out to be different from its listing, a member who does not turn up, travel and accommodation costs, and any dispute between members.
• We are not liable for what members write. Listings, messages, reviews and profiles are the words of the members who wrote them, not ours.
• We do not promise the site will be uninterrupted or error free, and we are not liable for loss caused by it being unavailable.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of an expected saving, or the cost of arranging a trip in some other way.

Where we are liable, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any twelve month period is limited to the membership fees you paid us in that period. We chose that figure because it is everything you have given us. It is a floor as much as a ceiling: this clause never operates to stop you recovering what you paid.

11. Your responsibilities to us

You agree to use Home Swap Club honestly and lawfully, and to keep to the Community Guidelines. If someone brings a claim against us because of something you did, for example a listing that was not true, content you did not have the right to publish, or the way you behaved towards another member, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it. This applies only to your own deliberate or negligent conduct. It does not apply where we were at fault, and nothing in it affects your rights as a consumer.

12. Reviews and things members write about each other

Members can review each other after a swap. A review is the honest opinion of the member who wrote it, published by us but not adopted by us. We do not check whether a review is true, because we were not there.

If you believe something written about you is false, tell us and we will look at it promptly. We can hide content while we do. What we cannot do is arbitrate whose account of a stay is correct, and we will not remove an honest review simply because its subject dislikes it.

13. Governing law, and the law where you live

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction.

That does not take anything away from you. If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and you can bring proceedings there if the law gives you that right. Members in Ontario keep every right the Consumer Protection Act gives them, including the right to go to court and the right to take part in a class proceeding. We have deliberately not asked you to give up either.

14. Changes

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects members we will give notice by email before it takes effect.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms: support@homeswapclub.com
Registered business name and address: [TO BE COMPLETED: your registered name and address]