Catching Up

To keep members informed: the company which hosts the Green Theme International web-site is currently migrating the site to a new server, and I am temporarily unable to upload the GTI August/September newsletter to web-site. I have therefore decided to post it on the GTI Home Exchange weblog instead, in the hope that members will log in here and read it.

Green Theme International Home Exchange August/September Newsletter

In this issue:
-- My Summer Sabbatical
-- It's never too late to renew your Membership
-- Uploading your Photographs
-- Swap-Spammers
-- Protecting your Privacy

My favourite Hobby Horse

This year I took a three months summer sabbatical. (It seems ironic that the last article prior to it that I posted on the GTI Home Exchange weblog should have been on Home Exchange and Sabbaticals). It would be nice to relate that my sabbatical was from choice, but it did in fact stem from a family health problem requiring me to help look after my four young grandchildren. It was great seeing so much of them for a change, as in normal circumstances we do not live closeby. It would have been even better had we been fortunate enough to find an extended home exchange in the area where we needed to be, the English Lake District, but as this is very much a holiday hotspot this was almost impossible. So many properties there have been bought up as investments to be used as holiday rentals at astronomical prices, causing all sorts of problems - the diminution of true village communities, weakening of community spirit, lack of affordable accommodation for people wishing to work in the area - in fact many of the reasons why I established Green Theme International Home Exchange in the first place, hoping to encourage people to make maximum use of their existing resources without the need to indulge in second homes etc. On a trip to the hairdresser, John (the hairdresser) told me that there are just six houses in their hamlet but that he and his wife are the only full-time occupants, the rest being either weekend homes or rental properties. The Lake District National Park Authority belatedly introduced a local occupancy restriction policy on the sale of certain properties, to try to redress the balance but this will take many years to have an effect. As my daughter Alison has been involved in the administration of the GTI Home Exchange for more than a year now, operating from our UK base, my absence was probably barely noticed, there being no reduction in level of service to you whilst I was away. The only area that we did not manage to keep up-to-date with was the GTI Home Exchange weblog.

It's never too late to renew your GTI Home Exchange membership

"Nous avons deja fait un echange en 2002 avec succes. J'aimerais une abonnement pour 2006. Merci de me renseigner. Jacques"

"We have already had a successful exchange in 2002. I would like to become a member for 2006. Please advise me. Jacques"
Thank you for your e-mail. As the period since your membership expired is more than two years, I regret that you will have to complete the Membership Registration form again as if you were a new member. This is because as soon as a member's listing expires it is hidden from view to ensure that all exchange listings are current with up-to-date offers of exchange. However, even when the membership is expired and not available for viewing, the listing remains on our database for a further period of two years, making it easy for the member to login and renew their listing. A reduced concessionary renewal fee is offered to members who renew within that 2-year period.Unfortunately because a period of more than two years has elapsed since Jacques' listing expired, it will not only have been hidden, but have been deleted completely from our database. Perhaps the fact that members are returning after a period of more than two years means that we should consider extending the period before we finally remove them from the database, especially as more and more people are making arrangements for long haul exchanges, but perhaps travelling less frequently because of the expense of the actual travel and the distance involved. If you have an opinion on this please let us know so that we can guage the need to extend our Membership Renewal period?

Uploading your photographs

As the old cliché goes, "A Picture is worth a 1000 Words", but it is true. Photos are virtually essential to a home exchange listing, they can make the exchange offer come alive more than anything else, and encourage many more enquiries than those without. And remember if your listing carries a photograph it will take its turn as the Feature Listing right on the front page of our web-site!

New member from Paris, Nicolas, wrote "I would like to introduce pictures of my apartment in my dossier, how can I do?" Thank you, Nicolas

Firstly ensure that the photos which you are uploading are in Jpeg format (it will have either a '.jpg' or '.jpeg' name extension). The Pictures will be automatically resized to be no more than 220 pixels in height, and pictures in landscape format (ie wider than they are tall) work best. Also, if possible ensure that the original picture which you are using is over 220 pixels in height, to minimise loss in quality, but no more than 100K in size to minimize the time taken to upload from your computer.

To upload your photographs, log on to the Members' Area with your Email Address and Password. When you arrive in your own administration area, click on the link 'Manage your Photos'. Browse your pictures file on your own computer, locate and open the first photograph which you wish to upload, the picture Filename will appear in the box, label it by selecting the appropriate image number (ie 1) from the drop-down list, and then click the 'Upload' button. Do this for each of the subsequent photographs labelling them 2, 3, 4 and 5 as appropriate. That is all there is to it.

Although Nicolas' enquiry was made in English, as he is a French member he might have found it easier to follow the upload procedure in his own language. So . . . .

Au sujet de l'emplacement des photos, voici le procédure à suivre:
Entrez dans la partie administrative vous concernant par cliquant sur le 'link' Login au-dessous du titre 'Members' Area' sur la page anglaise ou 'Adhérents' sur la page française respectivement pour arriver au page: http://www.gti-home-exchange.com/ihea/memberlogin.cfm
Entrez votre adresse email dans la première boite suivi par votre mot de passe dans la seconde. Cliquez sur le hyperlink 'Manage your Photos'. Vous arrivez à la page où vous pouvez ajouter ou modifier vos photos. Notez, s'il vous plait, que toutes photographies doivent être en .jpg format et, si possible, pas moins de 220 pixels en taille, afin de maintenir la qualité des photos. Photos avec une largeur plus grande que l'hauteur sont les mieux.

Souvenez ce que vous avez intitulées vos photos, et le titre du dossier où vous les avez sauvegardé sur votre ordinateur.

Utilisez le bouton 'Browse' pour choisir une photographie de votre ordinateur. Marquez la photo numéro 1, 2, 3, 4 ou 5 qui convient, et puis cliquez le bouton 'Upload'. Bientôt vous verrez la photo pour l'image que vous avez selectionnée dans la boite pour cette photo au-dessus.
Pour remplacer une photo, il faut supprimer la vieille photo avant d'enregistrer une nouvelle photo. En cette instance, vous retrouveriez peut-être que la vieille photo apparaîsse encore une fois après que vous avez cliqué le bouton 'Upload', mais actuellement elle a été remplacée, et quand votre 'session' à ce moment sur votre ordinateur s'est terminée, vous verrez la prochaine fois que vous entrez le site que la nouvelle photo est en place.N'hésitez pas à me contacter si vous avez besoin de renseignements complémentaires.

Swap-Spammers

I cannot claim to have coined this phrase myself, having come across it recently when I became aware of the home exchange blog at http://homeexchanger.blogspot.com/ written by home exchange enthusiast Nicole. As a very experienced home exchanger, her blog contains a tremendous depth of insight into the 'ins' and 'outs' of this fun way to travel. As she so aptly says, whilst we all celebrate the benefit that the internet has brought to the world of home exchange and the ease with which we are able to communicate with potential exchange partners with a few taps of the keyboard, as responsible and caring people home exchangers should avoid the pitfall of becoming swap-spammers. With so many exciting exchange opportunities on offer it is all too easy to paste your carefully prepared offer into the email form of a Member's listing and click the Send button, only to suddenly realise when you look at your 'Members I have contacted list' that you have far exceeded the number of enquiries you can sensibly deal with. And if you are lucky enough to receive many responses, it's tempting to take the expedient way out and just reply to the one or two offers that you wish to explore further leaving all the others who have expressed an interest dangling and frustrated without any explanation as to why they never heard back from the person who made the enquiry in the first place.

Home exchange is a community of like-minded people who all need to treat each other with respect for home exchange to work. Because of the philosophy of caring with which we differentiate our site and our enthusiasm for promoting ethical home exchange travel, we are sure that the vast majority of our members are respectful of each other and would never fall into this pitfall but it is always the exception that proves the rule.

Incidentally, if conversely you feel that you are not receiving the replies you should be, have you changed your email address recently? Make sure your email address within our system is up to date, login and check your settings (not forgetting that you will have to login with your former registered email address before you can access your Member Area to change your settings). After verifying that the email address displayed is correct, you can also then login to our website and view your own listing and send yourself an email to make sure that email is getting through your own SPAM filters and your own email protection. Sometimes we find that what members are using to keep out junk mail restricts legitimate email, or they have their level of security set too high.

Protecting your Privacy

Small can be beautiful when considering the important topic of protecting your privacy. We make every effort to avoid you from being subjected to spam and any solicitations that are not valid home exchange offers, but the nature of home exchange requires contact, and despite our best efforts we cannot always prevent unauthorized, unethical abuse of the system. Recently the activity of an upstart home exchange organisation was uncovered blatantly encouraging another agency's members to join their organisation, Trade to Travel, under the guise that it was a home exchange enquiry. Fortunately this was uncovered when only a few members had been contacted. Another organisation HomeWelcome actually plagiarised a listing from another agency's site and placed the listing on theirs, even sending the person in question a User ID and password!! Again, because the member immediately notified the agency of which he was legitimately a member, asking if they had given permission for this, the scam was promptly uncovered and the rogue agency required to remove the unauthorised listing. At this time GTI Home Exchange does not appear to have been attacked in this way, and being a relatively small agency enables us to maintain a high level of communication with our members and to quickly identify the perpetrators of any such activity. As GTI Home Exchange is a private, members only home exchange agency the type of conduct described is unethical and illegal and against our stated terms of use. If you do get any improper solicitations of this nature, please do NOT respond to the enquiry, but assist us by forwarding the emails directly to us. We will remain vigilant and will continue to work with our selected established home exchange associates to aggressively expose this unethical behaviour. We feel sure that potential home exchangers will feel inclined to trust an agency which is not trying to live off the back of another agency's hard work and has not illegally plagiarised another site. It would seem likely also that agencies whose members are required to pay a modest sum to join, (and who are therefore a known quantity to that agency because it has a record of the billing address from the credit card transaction) are more likely to be responsible, trustworthy and reliable people than those who have been tempted to list with an agency purely because that agency is offering free listings.