The Home Exchange Poacher

The purpose of home exchange agencies is to put you in touch with other people interested in exchanging homes for vacations. A good home exchange agency will have spent many years building an extensive member base in many countries, creating an attractive web-site to attract a constant stream of new members and initiating improvements to the web-site to make it very easy for their members to use. A good home exchange agency will build up a dialogue with their current members to provide them with lots of help and be available to answer their questions promptly.

As a result of this close relationship GTI Home Exchange members are usually prompt in advising us if they receive any unsolicited mailings from people who are trying to abuse our system. It has recently been brought to our notice that a lady by the name of Ans Lammers has been sending unsolicited messages to some members to join her new home exchange agency. The only way that this lady could have gained access to the email addresses of our members is to have joined under a pseudonym, as there is no one by that name registered on our database. When questionned, our members are certain
that she could not have obtained their names and email addresses elsewhere(especially for such a targetted mailing as would be necessary to reach members who are interested in home exchange).

Occasionally new agencies trying to establish themselves will offer free membership for a limited period, but it should be appreciated that free membership does not always attract the type of people you would wish to exchange with: if someone is not prepared to pay a small fee to join an agency, consider whether they may be genuinely committed to arranging an exchange. Whilst we cannot, of course, prevent members from joining another agency if the offer seems attractive and they wish to do so, we would hope that members would be cautious in supporting someone who is prepared to adopt such underhand methods to poach another agency's members.

Generally it is best to stay with an established home exchange agency that you can see has a good range of up-to-date exchange offers, and which operates a private, members-only site for extra safety.