PEI 2026: Home Swapping Once Again

Back in 2007, my husband Rich and I read in the newspaper about Geenee, a free home swap website. Having recently watched the romantic comedy “The Holiday”, we were intrigued by the idea of home swapping and decided to try it. We signed up for Geenee and were able to arrange a reciprocal exchange with a couple in Chicago and another one with a couple in Paris. But no more opportunities arose after that. Deciding that people on a free site might have signed up just to check it out and would not be as serious about swapping, we switched to Love Home Swap, a fee-based home swap site. With this company, we went on some amazing exchanges including the trips to the South of France, Antwerp (Belgium), Amsterdam and Venice. But all of these swaps were a result of others reaching out to us. Since we were retired and flexible with our time, we accepted any appealing requests that we received yet were unable to secure any swaps based on requests that we initiated. By the end of 2017, I was tired of having my requests rejected or even worse, ignored, so we decided to move on from home swapping.

In 2023, the French company Home Exchange, already the largest global home swap site, further expanded by purchasing Love Home Swap. What is intriguing about this home swap platform is their focus on non-reciprocal guest point swaps as opposed to trying to find a reciprocal match. You receive guest points for hosting guests at your place and then can use those points to stay at a totally different location, eliminating the need to find someone to swap with who also wants to come to your home. About 80% of Home Exchange swaps are based on guest points so it is an integral part of the culture of this site. This makes it infinitely easier to find a match. When you sign up for a membership, your home is assessed for “guest points value per night” based on the desirability of your location, the number of bedrooms available and other amenities. You are given a starting set of guest points (up to 800) that would be enough for a swap of 3-5 days.

We decided to dip our toe back into the home swap game by giving Home Exchange a try. We created an account and added our home for free. This allowed us to see what potential swaps were out there for us to request and also placed our home online for others to see before committing to purchasing the membership (at a cost of $235 USD a year). You can specify on a calendar which days your home is available for a points swap, a reciprocal swap, either type of swap, or is not available at all.  I asked a friend who was already on Home Exchange to refer me and we both received 250 extra guest points. This brought my total to 1050 points which would be good for almost a week stay at many locations, all without having to host a swap myself. If this all sounds good and you would like to try it, sign up at homeexchange.com, use my code annie-f5651 and I can refer you for bonus guest points! 😊

Because we had short mini-vacations planned in mid to late August to go to the Blyth Theatre Festival and to visit our friends in the Haliburton Highlands, we indicated our availability for guest points swaps during these periods. We were pleasantly surprised that within the first couple of weeks of signing up, we had two requests to stay at our home during these periods. For hosting these two swaps of 3 nights each, we received 501 points per swap. Now we had more than enough to try to arrange a trip for ourselves.

Since we had already taken our major vacation of the year in May with a 2.5-week trip to Copenhagen (still working on those blogs), followed by a bunch of mini cottage and theatre trips within Ontario, we decided to be conservative in our quest for our first home swap request with a shorter trip closer to home.  Rich has repeatedly voiced his desire to visit Prince Edward Island (PEI) since this is the only province in Canada that he has not yet been to. We searched for members on the Home Exchange website whose homes were in PEI, using each home’s location map to isolate those in the specific area that we were interested in, then filtered on places that had availability in early September when we wanted to travel (while the weather was still relatively warm). We came up with 3 or 4 possibilities and messaged each of them asking if we could arrange a non-reciprocal swap using our guest points. 

To our delight, we received a positive response and arranged for a 4-night stay in a quaint 2-bedroom cottage in the coastal village of North Rustico, PEI for a total of 600 guest points. We actually had enough points to complete this exchange even if we had not hosted twice ourselves, since we received 800 points just for becoming members. This one trip more than paid for our annual HomeExchange membership. But with our two hosting exchanges and bonus referral points, we now still have enough points after this swap to try for a 7-10-day trip somewhere in Europe next year. To fill out our PEI vacation, we booked a 2-night stay in downtown Charlottetown in a boutique inn prior to traveling to the home swap. We would need a car to get from Charlottetown to North Rustico and debated whether we should have the car while in Charlottetown or return to the airport to pick it up before heading to the home swap. In the end, we decided to have a car while in Charlottetown since the hotel had private parking included and it would save us from taking taxis from the airport to our hotel and back again to pick up the car later.

For the weeks and then days leading up to our vacation to PEI, we fretfully followed the weather forecast, which flipflopped on a daily basis along with our hopes and emotions. One day the forecast would call for rain for the entire week while the next day indicated sunshine. But as our departure date got closer, it became evident that while it would be sunny for our two days in Charlottetown, a huge storm was headed for North Rustico and we would face four days of extreme rain and wind during our time there. This was unfortunate since our plans for Charlottetown consisted of going to shops, restaurants and art galleries while the North Rustico days involved mostly outdoor activities including hikes, beaches and bike rides. As the forecast for the severity of the rain shifted for each day in North Rustico, I continuously juggled our planned activities in a desperate attempt to position our longest outdoor activities on the days with the least precipitation. Due to the predicted gale-force winds, we totally gave up on plans to rent bicycles but hoped we could salvage our hikes.

Then on the night before we were to fly, I had an epiphany. PEI is the smallest province in Canada and the driving time between any two locations is relatively short compared to the commutes that we were accustomed to in Toronto. We could invert our trip based on weather by front-loading our outdoor plans. From Charlottetown during the sunny days, we could drive for 30-50 minutes to reach red-sand beaches and National Parks closer to North Rustico.  Then from North Rustico, we could focus on indoor activities, potentially even driving back to Charlottetown to visit museums in the rain. The fact that we had decided to rent a car immediately from the airport to drive around Charlottetown made this plan viable and this turned a potentially disappointing trip into a wonderful and memorable time.

This trip was so last minute that we were at the mercy of whatever flights to/from PEI that we could find. On the way out, we selected a Porter Airline flight (luckily with a last-minute seat sale) that departed at 8:40am. Because of the early take-off time, we could not use our usual transportation route of taking the subway to Kipling station followed by the Red Rocket Express Bus, since that would not get us to the airport early enough. Instead, for the first time, we went via the UP Express since this service started earlier. If we caught on the first southbound subway train from St. Clair station at 5:48am, we could make it to Union station in time to catch the 6:15 or 6:30am UP train and get to the airport just after 7. We would still need to take an airport shuttle from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3. All went well as we caught all of our connections and got to Pearson Airport in plenty of time to zip through the Nexxus security line. The flight was smooth and uneventful and we landed in Charlottetown airport to glorious weather.

As it turned out, we were fortunate to have such an early flight which took off without issue, since later that day, Toronto experienced one of the worst storms in 100 years. Between 4:30pm-6pm on September 2, 2026, Toronto was hit with 126 mm of torrential rain along with destructive, high-velocity winds peaking at 110 km per hour, causing major floods, power outages, structural damage and over 140 flights canceled. So, although we caught the tail-end of this storm several days later in North Rustico, we were lucky to make it PEI at all and enjoyed two days of bright sunshine and warm temperatures before the inclement weather arrived. I will try to quickly finish writing about this impromptu home swap trip to PEI before resuming my Copenhagen blogs (with the hope to finish those before next year’s big vacation). I am also excited about trying for our next home swap opportunity in 2027.