Dan Gadish and Shai Nathanson have souvenirs from their travels all over their four-story South End town house: a mask from Bali in the guest room, figurines from Peru on top of the piano, a Moroccan rug in the front hallway.
Mixed with those worldly possessions are signs: “Damper is closed’’ on the fireplace, “This is heat’’ on a thermostat, “Please do not remove towel (or else shower door will bang into sink)’’ stapled to a towel and translated into French.
As home-swap veterans, the retired couple keeps these notes up for the steady stream of strangers who stay in the house while they’re staying in theirs. Gadish, 57, and Nathanson, 62, have exchanged homes with people almost 100 times in a dozen years.
As the economy scrapes bottom and travelers look for ways to take affordable trips, vacationers are switching houses with other people - and reducing their lodging costs to nothing.
The option can also cut other travel costs: People often exchange things like cars and museum passes as part of the home swap.
Swapping is becoming so popular that home-exchange services across the country are seeing increased numbers of people signing up to have their properties listed online, while many hotels have had double-digit declines in revenue recently.
“People are realizing this is a way they can be frugal and not have to cut back,’’ said Ed Kushins, founder of HomeExchange.com, a California-based site that since September has seen a 25 percent increase in the number of weekly listings, compared to the year before.
HomeExchange.com, which has adopted the unofficial slogan “vacation like there’s no recession,’’ charges vacationers $99 a year to belong to the site and has more than 28,000 homes listed, including 360 in Massachusetts. The site hasn’t seen such high demand, Kushins says, since it was featured in the 2006 movie “The Holiday,’’ in which characters played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet swap their houses in Los Angeles and the English countryside, and find romance.
HomeLink International, a website that lists home swaps, also has had a surge. “We started noticing it about a year ago when there was all that wonderful news about the economy,’’ said Karl Costabel, who runs the company’s Florida-based US office.
Susan Jacobs of Swampscott is finding house swapping to be an economical way to vacation. She did her second home swap through the classifieds website Craigslist in October, for a weekend trip to Manhattan - and saving money was definitely on her mind. She traded her four-bedroom home for an apartment on East 80th Street that had room for her partner, her two children, and her mother-in-law.