Homeexchange.com: Too Much Hype; Poor management
AlteCocker absolutely detests homeexchange.com. She has detested it since she wasted her money for a year on the site and came up empty handed. Now, due to reported website problems, she hates it even more. Let me tell you why.
Homeexchange.com is run by one man, Ed Kushins. He really doesn't care if members get home exchanges so long as he rakes in the cash. AlteCocker got suckered into a membership several years ago because he lists homes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hoping to explore new areas of the world, AlteCocker joined homeexchange.com. It was a total waste of her time.
AlteCocker expected another service such as Homelink or Intervac where there was plenty of mentoring of new people and concern that people actually complete their deals. Nope. Homeexchange.com is all about the money--money for Ed Kushins. AlteCocker lives 20 minutes from all the monuments of Washington, DC, and the Smithsonian Museums. She never has problems getting home exchange deals. Inquiries come in all the time through Homelink & Intervac. She has crisscrossed Europe a piece at a time. With homeexchange.com she got not one inquiry, but she did get crazy email such as one that said "Wanna swap?" and nothing else.
The problems are many:
1. For any North American homeexchange.com is loaded with North Americans. If North Americans want to go to Europe, well, you go find a deal when there are too many Americans. It won't happen.
2. For Europeans the odds might be better, but too many of Kushins' Europeans are in France--where Kushins has heavily promoted the site.
3. Kushins has too many rentals. Those homes that enticed AlteCocker in Asia, Africa & Latin America? You'd have these conversations with people--if you could get them to answer email--and then they would spring the fact on you that they were renting a property and not interested in a home exchange. Adding rentals is a way for Kushins to claim that he has homes for exchange all over the world--even when the "exchange" homes are rental properties.
4. Kushins is not interested in teaching people how to do a home exchange. It wastes his time because it doesn't make money for him. He is interested in raking in the cash and is terrific at self promotion. Every experienced home exchange AlteCocker knows who has used the site leaves. It is all the same story. Few even answer email and few get deals.
5. AlteCocker attempted to talk to Kushins about teaching people the how toos. His response "they will learn." Period. The end. Would he help them learn? No. It doesn't make money for him to spend time teaching. So he dupes people into thinking that all they need to do is sign up and they will get a penthouse apartment in New York City overlooking Central Park (with a pool) in exchange for their home in rural (you name it) just for the asking. The Europeans on his site all think they are going to New York City when most apartment buildings bar home exchange arrangements there. There are, in fact, very few listings from New York City on all the sites for that reason. If anyone answers your email at all, you get a response: "I only want to go to New York." It simply doesn't work that way. You have to be open to go anywhere.
6. AlteCocker remembers seeing a listing on homeexchange.com from a woman in Finland who only wanted an exchange in Tel Aviv for certain dates. She already had her air ticket. Duh. You get your exchange first and then you get your air ticket--not the other way round. When AlteCocker suggested that Kushins check his listings for unrealistic requests and mentor the people, he was totally disinterested. After all, he was pocketing the dinero from their listings.
7. Don't be duped by Kushins' statistics. AlteCocker has been told that people's listings were automatically renewed with charges to credit cards when they wanted to leave (and that the site makes it impossible for you to access and change your billing information). When refunds were demanded, homeexhange.com basically stonewalls. There is a suspicion that Kushins is entirely too slow to remove the listings of people who don't renew and also does not check for duplicate listings when a site is bought out and its members are added to the total. The fact that is very difficult to get anyone to answer email over there could be because you are emailing deceased listings. And please don't believe the hype about the number of exchanges arranged through homeexchange.com. He has no statistics. No home exchange website does. Only the individuals have statistics on their own personal home exchanges. There are no accurate statistics because many experienced exchangers do not do home exchange agreements because they are legally worthless and/or do not register them with the sites. The so called "statistics" maybe just wishful thinking.
8. After a year on homeexchange.com, and despite working the site heavily, AlteCocker got not one homeexchange offer. Mind you, she doesn't have to work Homelink or Intervac to get offers. They just come in. Most inquiries did not even result in a "no thank you response". They resulted in nothing. AlteCocker suggested to Kushins that he take a leaf from Homelink and list members rate of response. Her suggestion was ignored. The problem could be the tardy removal of the dear departed members--or failing to remove them at all.
9. The piece de resistance here, however, was the launch of the new homeexchange.com website. As soon as the website was launched, Kushins and his staff took off for Italy to celebrate. The website crashed and the entire staff was in Italy? This is a smart business move? No. They were in Italy spending members' money while members were furious. Anyone who has ever launched a new website knows that it always comes with problems--except, apparently, Ed Kushins.
10. By the way, should you be so bold to annoy homeexchange.com on facebook with your complaints, they mavens at homeexchange.com will eventually block you and delete the negative comments.
On August 11, 2013, Kushins sent this message to his members:
Last month, after more than a year of research, design and testing, we launched our newly enhanced site. We were thrilled that without any announcement or promotion, 32% of you had added Profiles and Photos, thousands of our new Home Exchange Agreements had been completed and tens of thousands of inquiries had been made through the new Messaging System.
But some things didn't go as we expected, and I want to personally apologize for any technical issues you may now be having. Though our staff is working around the clock to get everything running the way it's designed to run, resolutions have not come in time to prevent the unacceptable level of inconvenience many of you are experiencing with some of the site functionality.
Our entire Team thinks of HomeExchange.com as a community, and we share your frustration. We are extremely disappointed that despite over a year of extensive testing, what was supposed to be a timely transition to a more efficient future has been marred by a number of technical bugs.
Our intention with the new site was to implement a more intuitive Search that anticipates what you want to do, a faster photo uploader, the ability to search messages by keyword and lots of other advanced features designed to make your experience easier and more fun -- not harder and more aggravating. Please be patient and trust me, these rewards are still waiting at the end of the tunnel.
We'll keep you updated as the work progresses. You can also find detailed information at our System Status Website. In the meantime, we've increased our Support staff to help with specific issues you might be having. Our LiveChat specialists are available here 24 hours a day to work with you one-on-one to find solutions to many of these issues. Or you can send a message to our Customer Service Team, who will respond as quickly as possible.
I thank you for your patience.
With my very best regards and sincere apology, Ed Kushins President HomeExchange.com
[email protected]"
Obviously, Kushins omitted to mention that he and the staff took off on vacation (paid for by the members, naturally) as the website launched. This was the reaction of one of homeexchange.com's disgruntled members:
Ed,
That excuse laden, contradictory email is offensive. I'm glad I have cancelled my membership. If I would have known that you would take the company to Sicily durning a relaunch & during peak time I would have never renewed my membership in the first place. A smart Internet company & its leaders would have never done such a thing.
I should know, my wife is an executive for a web-based company and she's appalled at the excuses & actions by your company.
Have you taken into account the hundreds, if not thousands of potential vacations you have ruined?
Shame on you and everyone who is perpetrating the lies from HomeExchange.com!
Great way to piss off over 40,000 people worldwide [assuming Kushins really has that many members, AC].
A happy ex-HomeExchange.com member,
S. [full name deleted for privacy reasons]
Here is the response Kushins sent to Steve:
Dear Steve,
I have to tell you that I empathize with everything you wrote. We certainly would not have launched had we known that it wasn't going to get into orbit. Our Italy meeting was planned a year ago and we expected it to be a celebration, not an Apollo 13 disaster recovery operation. I hope you'll come back sometime in the future to take a look at this site when it's operating the way it was designed, and if you would ever consider giving us another chance, let me know and I'd be more than happy to give you a free subscription.
With sincere apologies for your experiences on our site,
Ed KushinsPresident:
Steve wrote back the following:
Ed,
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I'm still having trouble believing anything that's being conveyed. I'm not responding to begin a confrontation, but rather call a spade a spade.
Your Italy meeting & launch were both planned around the same time, since you stated that you have been planning/testing the website for over a year. Then you state that it was meant to be a celebration, quite contradictory. See my point?
If there was an honest mistake, and let's face it we all make mistakes, I have no problem giving people the benefit of the doubt the first time something happens. But if I'm lied to or led to believe something that's not the whole truth, that benefit is turned straight to distrust.
Your carelessness as a leader at a company that depends on specific searches of dates, locations & communications failed.........I have no faith in you and your service, be it free or paid for. I have no intention of ever utilizing your website ever again. I would appreciate it if all of my information is removed from it as well. [substantiating that members' information is kept up after they discontinue membership]
Further correspondence has not been furnished to AlteCocker but she did speak with another angry homeexchange.com member--someone whose membership was renewed against her wishes and has not been able to obtain a refund. While Kushins offered the angry "S." a free membership (another way to inflate statistics is free memberships), he certainly didn't offer them to all of his members who were inconvenienced.
Other members have tried to discontinue their membership without success. Recently there was a post that said as follows: "Contrary to previous practice to notify us that a payment is due, you have debited our bank account without our approval. Payment by direct debit does not mean that you can charge us without notice. You have not allowed us to decide whether we will continue our membership or discontinue, which is what we had intended to do. " Homeexchange.com's response was to please send them a PRIVATE email and they would straighten it out. Why, pray tell, can't they "straighten it out" in public? Asking people online to quit complaining and take things private is, of course a way to hide the problems from other site members--and very dishonest.
Do yourself a favor and join Homelink, Intervac, homeforexchange.com, or another reputable home exchange service. The last place you want to be if you want home exchanges, is on homeexchange.com. By the way, should you be so bold as to criticize homeexchange.com on its discussion page, homeexchange.com will delete your post. For a good place to discuss home exchange in general that is independent, try Home Exchange Discussion on Facebook. It is run by a Finnish home exchanger, not AlteCocker. It is a private site--which means you have to ask to join, but the moderator will quickly let you in.
If you want to know where your homeeexchange.com money goes, well it does fund expensive overseas jaunts for the American staff. In addition to the Italian holiday, Kushins was recently seen on twitter bragging about taking the office to Budapest in March 2014. If he would just spend a fraction of the money he dumps on vacations on teaching people how to do a home exchange and deleting all the dead listings, it certainly could turn into an honest site. Right now, with the inflated numbers, over the top PR and lying about actual numbers, AlteCocker would have to advise everyone to head for the exits. The new site problems may be fixed (or not) but the lying has not. My hunch is that homeexchange.com, which currently claims 50,000 members, probably is much closer to Intervac's claimed 30,000, Homelink's 13,000 and HomeForExchange's 13,000. It is clearly nothing like 50,000 (the most recent number bandied about by homeexchange.com)--which is just a public relations lie.
For further information on How to Do a Home Exchange, just click. There is a blog below so you can comment.
Homeexchange.com is run by one man, Ed Kushins. He really doesn't care if members get home exchanges so long as he rakes in the cash. AlteCocker got suckered into a membership several years ago because he lists homes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hoping to explore new areas of the world, AlteCocker joined homeexchange.com. It was a total waste of her time.
AlteCocker expected another service such as Homelink or Intervac where there was plenty of mentoring of new people and concern that people actually complete their deals. Nope. Homeexchange.com is all about the money--money for Ed Kushins. AlteCocker lives 20 minutes from all the monuments of Washington, DC, and the Smithsonian Museums. She never has problems getting home exchange deals. Inquiries come in all the time through Homelink & Intervac. She has crisscrossed Europe a piece at a time. With homeexchange.com she got not one inquiry, but she did get crazy email such as one that said "Wanna swap?" and nothing else.
The problems are many:
1. For any North American homeexchange.com is loaded with North Americans. If North Americans want to go to Europe, well, you go find a deal when there are too many Americans. It won't happen.
2. For Europeans the odds might be better, but too many of Kushins' Europeans are in France--where Kushins has heavily promoted the site.
3. Kushins has too many rentals. Those homes that enticed AlteCocker in Asia, Africa & Latin America? You'd have these conversations with people--if you could get them to answer email--and then they would spring the fact on you that they were renting a property and not interested in a home exchange. Adding rentals is a way for Kushins to claim that he has homes for exchange all over the world--even when the "exchange" homes are rental properties.
4. Kushins is not interested in teaching people how to do a home exchange. It wastes his time because it doesn't make money for him. He is interested in raking in the cash and is terrific at self promotion. Every experienced home exchange AlteCocker knows who has used the site leaves. It is all the same story. Few even answer email and few get deals.
5. AlteCocker attempted to talk to Kushins about teaching people the how toos. His response "they will learn." Period. The end. Would he help them learn? No. It doesn't make money for him to spend time teaching. So he dupes people into thinking that all they need to do is sign up and they will get a penthouse apartment in New York City overlooking Central Park (with a pool) in exchange for their home in rural (you name it) just for the asking. The Europeans on his site all think they are going to New York City when most apartment buildings bar home exchange arrangements there. There are, in fact, very few listings from New York City on all the sites for that reason. If anyone answers your email at all, you get a response: "I only want to go to New York." It simply doesn't work that way. You have to be open to go anywhere.
6. AlteCocker remembers seeing a listing on homeexchange.com from a woman in Finland who only wanted an exchange in Tel Aviv for certain dates. She already had her air ticket. Duh. You get your exchange first and then you get your air ticket--not the other way round. When AlteCocker suggested that Kushins check his listings for unrealistic requests and mentor the people, he was totally disinterested. After all, he was pocketing the dinero from their listings.
7. Don't be duped by Kushins' statistics. AlteCocker has been told that people's listings were automatically renewed with charges to credit cards when they wanted to leave (and that the site makes it impossible for you to access and change your billing information). When refunds were demanded, homeexhange.com basically stonewalls. There is a suspicion that Kushins is entirely too slow to remove the listings of people who don't renew and also does not check for duplicate listings when a site is bought out and its members are added to the total. The fact that is very difficult to get anyone to answer email over there could be because you are emailing deceased listings. And please don't believe the hype about the number of exchanges arranged through homeexchange.com. He has no statistics. No home exchange website does. Only the individuals have statistics on their own personal home exchanges. There are no accurate statistics because many experienced exchangers do not do home exchange agreements because they are legally worthless and/or do not register them with the sites. The so called "statistics" maybe just wishful thinking.
8. After a year on homeexchange.com, and despite working the site heavily, AlteCocker got not one homeexchange offer. Mind you, she doesn't have to work Homelink or Intervac to get offers. They just come in. Most inquiries did not even result in a "no thank you response". They resulted in nothing. AlteCocker suggested to Kushins that he take a leaf from Homelink and list members rate of response. Her suggestion was ignored. The problem could be the tardy removal of the dear departed members--or failing to remove them at all.
9. The piece de resistance here, however, was the launch of the new homeexchange.com website. As soon as the website was launched, Kushins and his staff took off for Italy to celebrate. The website crashed and the entire staff was in Italy? This is a smart business move? No. They were in Italy spending members' money while members were furious. Anyone who has ever launched a new website knows that it always comes with problems--except, apparently, Ed Kushins.
10. By the way, should you be so bold to annoy homeexchange.com on facebook with your complaints, they mavens at homeexchange.com will eventually block you and delete the negative comments.
On August 11, 2013, Kushins sent this message to his members:
Last month, after more than a year of research, design and testing, we launched our newly enhanced site. We were thrilled that without any announcement or promotion, 32% of you had added Profiles and Photos, thousands of our new Home Exchange Agreements had been completed and tens of thousands of inquiries had been made through the new Messaging System.
But some things didn't go as we expected, and I want to personally apologize for any technical issues you may now be having. Though our staff is working around the clock to get everything running the way it's designed to run, resolutions have not come in time to prevent the unacceptable level of inconvenience many of you are experiencing with some of the site functionality.
Our entire Team thinks of HomeExchange.com as a community, and we share your frustration. We are extremely disappointed that despite over a year of extensive testing, what was supposed to be a timely transition to a more efficient future has been marred by a number of technical bugs.
Our intention with the new site was to implement a more intuitive Search that anticipates what you want to do, a faster photo uploader, the ability to search messages by keyword and lots of other advanced features designed to make your experience easier and more fun -- not harder and more aggravating. Please be patient and trust me, these rewards are still waiting at the end of the tunnel.
We'll keep you updated as the work progresses. You can also find detailed information at our System Status Website. In the meantime, we've increased our Support staff to help with specific issues you might be having. Our LiveChat specialists are available here 24 hours a day to work with you one-on-one to find solutions to many of these issues. Or you can send a message to our Customer Service Team, who will respond as quickly as possible.
I thank you for your patience.
With my very best regards and sincere apology, Ed Kushins President HomeExchange.com
[email protected]"
Obviously, Kushins omitted to mention that he and the staff took off on vacation (paid for by the members, naturally) as the website launched. This was the reaction of one of homeexchange.com's disgruntled members:
Ed,
That excuse laden, contradictory email is offensive. I'm glad I have cancelled my membership. If I would have known that you would take the company to Sicily durning a relaunch & during peak time I would have never renewed my membership in the first place. A smart Internet company & its leaders would have never done such a thing.
I should know, my wife is an executive for a web-based company and she's appalled at the excuses & actions by your company.
Have you taken into account the hundreds, if not thousands of potential vacations you have ruined?
Shame on you and everyone who is perpetrating the lies from HomeExchange.com!
Great way to piss off over 40,000 people worldwide [assuming Kushins really has that many members, AC].
A happy ex-HomeExchange.com member,
S. [full name deleted for privacy reasons]
Here is the response Kushins sent to Steve:
Dear Steve,
I have to tell you that I empathize with everything you wrote. We certainly would not have launched had we known that it wasn't going to get into orbit. Our Italy meeting was planned a year ago and we expected it to be a celebration, not an Apollo 13 disaster recovery operation. I hope you'll come back sometime in the future to take a look at this site when it's operating the way it was designed, and if you would ever consider giving us another chance, let me know and I'd be more than happy to give you a free subscription.
With sincere apologies for your experiences on our site,
Ed KushinsPresident:
Steve wrote back the following:
Ed,
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I'm still having trouble believing anything that's being conveyed. I'm not responding to begin a confrontation, but rather call a spade a spade.
Your Italy meeting & launch were both planned around the same time, since you stated that you have been planning/testing the website for over a year. Then you state that it was meant to be a celebration, quite contradictory. See my point?
If there was an honest mistake, and let's face it we all make mistakes, I have no problem giving people the benefit of the doubt the first time something happens. But if I'm lied to or led to believe something that's not the whole truth, that benefit is turned straight to distrust.
Your carelessness as a leader at a company that depends on specific searches of dates, locations & communications failed.........I have no faith in you and your service, be it free or paid for. I have no intention of ever utilizing your website ever again. I would appreciate it if all of my information is removed from it as well. [substantiating that members' information is kept up after they discontinue membership]
Further correspondence has not been furnished to AlteCocker but she did speak with another angry homeexchange.com member--someone whose membership was renewed against her wishes and has not been able to obtain a refund. While Kushins offered the angry "S." a free membership (another way to inflate statistics is free memberships), he certainly didn't offer them to all of his members who were inconvenienced.
Other members have tried to discontinue their membership without success. Recently there was a post that said as follows: "Contrary to previous practice to notify us that a payment is due, you have debited our bank account without our approval. Payment by direct debit does not mean that you can charge us without notice. You have not allowed us to decide whether we will continue our membership or discontinue, which is what we had intended to do. " Homeexchange.com's response was to please send them a PRIVATE email and they would straighten it out. Why, pray tell, can't they "straighten it out" in public? Asking people online to quit complaining and take things private is, of course a way to hide the problems from other site members--and very dishonest.
Do yourself a favor and join Homelink, Intervac, homeforexchange.com, or another reputable home exchange service. The last place you want to be if you want home exchanges, is on homeexchange.com. By the way, should you be so bold as to criticize homeexchange.com on its discussion page, homeexchange.com will delete your post. For a good place to discuss home exchange in general that is independent, try Home Exchange Discussion on Facebook. It is run by a Finnish home exchanger, not AlteCocker. It is a private site--which means you have to ask to join, but the moderator will quickly let you in.
If you want to know where your homeeexchange.com money goes, well it does fund expensive overseas jaunts for the American staff. In addition to the Italian holiday, Kushins was recently seen on twitter bragging about taking the office to Budapest in March 2014. If he would just spend a fraction of the money he dumps on vacations on teaching people how to do a home exchange and deleting all the dead listings, it certainly could turn into an honest site. Right now, with the inflated numbers, over the top PR and lying about actual numbers, AlteCocker would have to advise everyone to head for the exits. The new site problems may be fixed (or not) but the lying has not. My hunch is that homeexchange.com, which currently claims 50,000 members, probably is much closer to Intervac's claimed 30,000, Homelink's 13,000 and HomeForExchange's 13,000. It is clearly nothing like 50,000 (the most recent number bandied about by homeexchange.com)--which is just a public relations lie.
For further information on How to Do a Home Exchange, just click. There is a blog below so you can comment.