Site Features at Intervac.com

Your Listing

Your online entry allows you to record a great deal of information about your home and surroundings. To get the most from your membership it is essential to promote your home and its area, indicating where you are, how best to be reached and what's on offer. The more information you can give in the form of photos and text, the more it helps other members to decide that your offer is exactly what they are searching.

Photos and Descriptive Text

Intervac provides facilities for you to post up to twenty photos and write (unlimited!) descriptive text under the headings: your home, family, lifestyle and neighbourhood. Multi-lingual members often post descriptions in their various languages in order to improve the findability of their listing by keyword searches. It is all quite easy to do, there is lots of help text available on the site, and your local organiser is happy to help if you find you have questions that are not already answered.

A Map of Your Surroundings

Every listing has an (optional) Google map so that perspective partners can get a good picture of the neighborhood where your home is located. The marker is not by default placed precisely on your home. If you like though, you can place it yourself using latitude and longitude.

Search Facilities

The right combination search facility is important to your ease of finding the perfect partner. Our online system supports searching by:

• Country
• Region
• Exchange dates
• Exchange types
• Keyword (within the extra text in a listing)
• Spoken language of exchange partner
• Sleeping accommodations
• Family - number of adults, with or without kids
• Twenty-three important detail criteria
• Or, any combination of the above.

Reverse Search?

We sure do, and it's the most comprehensive reverse search in the industry. We encourage our members to fill in as many regions and cities as they like (it's unlimited!) so that you can find all members who are specifically interested in visiting your country, region or nearest city. That's service!

What types of vacation does Intervac's online system support?

• Home Exchange: Our main focus - two families agree to live in each other's homes over a specified period of time.
• msgstr House Sitting: Looking after someone else's home, mail, pets while they are away.
• Double Exchange: Two families (often they live near each other) looking to exchange with two families. This type of exchange is a favorite of neighbors who vacation together and extended families.
• Hospitality Exchange: Members agree to exchange visits in each other’s homes.
• Long Term Exchanges: between retired people, university staff, or employees of global multi-national companies.
• Bed and Breakfast: This is the same as the well known public variety, but is offered between members, without the exchange of monies.
• Rentals: Members sometimes list holiday homes which they usually rent out for a drastically reduced price to members.
• Youth Exchange: A chance for young people to learn about new cultures without their own parents hanging around all the time.
• Youth Hospitality: Young people agree to visit each other.

Integrated Messaging System

Email can get lost or sucked into a spam filter - but a an offer sent through our system is waiting for you when you login.

Yes, that's right, we have an integrated messaging system that allows you to contact other members in rich text (with links!) and without ever leaving our system. You can see that a message has been sent and when it was read. Offers and answers to your messages be waiting for you to when you login and they are super easy to answer with templates in rich text - click a button.

Write unlimited templates for both sending and answering your messages. For example: write a send template named France - Spring Next Year or an answer template No thanks in which you politely tell an enquiring member that their offer is not what you are looking for at the moment. There is no limit to the number of templates you can write. Compose more than one No thanks template: one for offers in which you are definitely not interested, and one for ones you might want to come back to at a later date. Or use different send templates to plan several holidays at once.

Member Favorites

And speaking of coming back to an offer at a later date, that's where your Favorites list can help you keep track of your dream vacations. With the click of a button, you can add a listing to your favorites. Write notes in unlimited rich text in the notes section and keep track of your contacts.

Match Alert!

Here is a nifty tool designed with the frequent exchanger in mind. Tell our system what sort of offers interest you, and how frequently you would like to be notified of potential matches and we'll send you an email with up to twenty potential exchange partners. What is special about that? The settings you put in your Match Alert profile can be completely different from those in your listing! So, if you are trying to arrange two exchanges, one for Spring and one at Christmas, set your Christmas date preferences in your Match Alert profile, and we'll let you know about the hot prospects while you advertise in your listing for your Spring holiday dates.

Last Minute Listings

This is a succinct list of members looking for a partner for an exchange within the next eight weeks. Adding your listing to the Last Minute List is easy as clicking a button. Your listing will appear on the Last Minute List for four days, after which you can click to add it again if you are still looking.