HomeExchange - House Swapping 4+

We've been using it for just under a year and have done 18 exchanges (10 as hosts, 8 as guests). We. Love. It. Have met some amazing people, traveled to some amazing places. You do have to put a bit of effort in to find a home to stay in ( if your expectation is that you can just enter your dates and location and press a 'book' button and have a place to stay you're probably going to be disappointed - exchanges require you to have a conversation with the guest/host via the app message function first). But that's part of what we love - getting to know the people who are staying at our home and the people whose home we are staying at.

My only suggestion to improve the app and website functionality would be to enable users to have their welcome booklets attached to their profiles so they can release them to their guest prior to their stay (we currently email ours through). It would be nice if that could be done through HE but it also shouldn't be automatic - the host should be able to choose when it gets released because most have access codes or key locations in them.

I’ve done 2 exchanges and they were both easy and I had no problems with either. I like that we can either simultaneously exchange, exchange during different times or use/gain points. I really love this concept and am planning my next trip now. Some of the cleaning fees are a little extreme; $250 was requested on one. I understand when a home is used as a vacation rental and they shouldn’t have to pay money for me to stay there so I felt I needed to ask for a cleaning fee also but don’t want that to become the norm. I live in my home so it’s a little different but I hire for deep cleaning. It’s really nothing compared to staying in a hotel or Airbnb. Overall I highly recommend Home Exchange!!

All travellers rely on mobile apps to manage all their multiple crucial details. This app is abysmal compared to dozens of others I use for travel. Absolute bottom of the barrel.
(Guys, It's like you're designing for 1999. The demographic for home exchange are mostly old baby boomers... Intuitive UX will be the key to retaining members. Everyone is complaining. Please hire some real UX people with actual experience!! And synch up with the equally poorly designed but generally working website. The app navigation and Web are often different. Either way it makes for such a frustrating user experience.)
Navigation is terrible. Franglais is also a consistent problem throughout the app. Programming leads to app crashes 40% of the time.
EG. Today trying to message a few favorited places and make new connections (isn't that the whole point of home exchange?) and for hours on end the app crashes as soon as you hit the MESSAGE button. Useless!! So many hours wasted.