Travel
Originally published on Tuesday, 15th June 2010
(Room) Service Not Included
With the launch of Swap My City Pad, the world is your oyster. For free.
Fact: great hotels are addictive. For example, the delivery of a club sandwich and glass of bubbly, ordered on a whim at 2am, might just be the definition of heaven itself. Then there’s that delicious sense of regal anonymity, the infinite helpfulness, the mini-bar… And of course the bill. Always and forever, that damned bill.
Think about it: remove the cost of the hotel and a spontaneous long weekend in New York becomes instantly more affordable. And whilst flat-swapping seems the obvious solution, as with all forms of tit-for-tat it’s cursed by those same haunting questions: To what kind of person am I trusting my beloved tit? What is their tat really going to be like?
Swap My City Pad aims to tackle exactly this. It’s like a Facebook for travelling urbanites with nice apartments. You sign-up (for a small fee) to join the community. You post your ‘pad’ with lots of images and any local recommendations (it adds a map automatically for ease). Then just find someone else with an equally hot apartment in the city you fancy, a travel diary that lines up with yours and then, well, you do the deed (so to speak).
Currently focusing on London, New York and Paris, it’s sort of like a slick metropolitan dating site – just without the fear of ‘down-dating’. Or the awkward silences.