AN IRISH mum has shared how house swapping with foreigners has saved her hundreds of holidays – with stays in Spanish villas and mountain top ski resorts.

Samantha Rath of Co Wexford has ditched expensive hotel stays and AirBnbs in favor of full home exchanges with holidaymakers from all over the world.

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Using the LoveHomeSwap site, Samantha has explored new countries with her husband and two young boys and isn’t looking back.

She said that while it’s a risk to allow people she doesn’t know stay in her house and her friends think she’s crazy, she’s had several amazing experiences that have really paid off.

Samantha told the Irish Sun: “I don’t have any problems now but looking back I was nervous. It’s not really an Irish thing to do, open your doors to complete strangers you don’t know.

“But we can all use Facebook and Instagram and at least you get to know these people a little bit and you can have a phone call, zoom in on meeting them.

“There are people I’ve only ever spoken to on the phone and you get a good vibe on the phone with someone. You can sort of judge the character so luckily so far so good. “

Samantha said she came up with the idea of ​​doing a home exchange while researching options online and decided to go for it.

She said: “It ticks all the boxes for us really in the sense that you can be restricted when you go to hotels and it can be very expensive and you might not be able to live like a local either.

“It depends, so we really liked that aspect that we could kind of blend into an area and live like a local, it’s really fun.”

Samantha said her sons, aged seven and 10, love the chance to run an entire household in a foreign country.

She said: “When we went to Marbella, a retired couple without children came to see us and we headed to Spain.

“We had our own pool, and they had never been to Wexford so they were happy, it was an English couple but they were retired in Spain so it was really fun.

“Of course we booked a water park for the boys thinking ‘oh that’s great a full day in the water park’. They were there ten minutes and they wanted to go back to the villa in our own pool!

FLEXIBILITY

“You can be really lucky, we also have to go skiing in Bulgaria, so it was a situation where we paid points on the website.”

Samantha changes all the sheets, spruces up the house, and even has a “home swap kettle” that she takes out before she goes on vacation.

She said that depending on the group of people who come, she can close the rooms she doesn’t want them to enter and there is a lot of flexibility.

Samantha said: “We’re doing it again this year and I think it could be our fourth year. We’re good at it now, we were very nervous at the start obviously because you don’t know what might happen and you just think ‘oh my god this is crazy.

“But it’s a club and everyone is invested in the same idea. Everyone has the same idea that they just want to go somewhere and they feel limited by a hotel situation, you don’t have need to be up for breakfast or dinner, you just have to have that flexibility.

“The most important thing in my world is my children, so if anything should go wrong, a home is just a home and that’s it.

“But I have friends who think it’s crazy, who ask how does it work? But we haven’t had any problems so far.”

GLOBETROTTERS

Samantha said she had received offers from people around the world wanting to stay in Wexford, including a doctor who wanted them to come to Tuscany for a month.

She said: “Basically when we joined our trial, we were on a mission to see if it could actually work because the trial was free. We took full advantage of it.

“So I chose Spain, my husband chose Portugal, and we just sent a ton of messages to see what would happen. ‘test.

“I had someone contact me from Nora in Sweden and I was like where is it? You can go anywhere, we’re going to France ourselves this year but an American told me contacted to want to come too.

“You can really plan your world around it. I love that, it gives you a lot of flexibility.

“Of course it depends on what you want to do, but we certainly saved a lot on accommodation.”