A few have weathered the trials of time and still remain today, but the vast majority has fallen by the wayside, although quickly replaced by fresh contenders.

This has left the inexperienced swapper with next to no guidelines, no course of action when selecting a club to join. A few books on the general subject of home exchange have come and gone, but none have taken the aspiring home exchanger by the hand and walked him through the entire process step by step. That is, until now ?

A brand new e-book?Home Exchange Academy?has just hit the market and I see it as a winner! Athena Ricky, the author has been home exchanging with her family for more than twenty five years, she's the veteran of more than forty swaps so it's not difficult to see where her depth of knowledge springs from.

The opening title describes the e-book as a ?Blueprint to Swap Homes For Your Next Vacation and Get Out Of The Hotel Rut?, and that's a perfect summation. Home Exchange Academy could not be more detailed. It explains exactly how to compare all the clubs presently available, what to look for on their web sites, plus the red flags to guard against.

Once a club has been chosen the author explains right down to the last detail exactly how to set up a listing, what text and information must be included. She also has some excellent suggestions for integrating more photographs and information than the website listings can accommodate.

Also covered in extensive detail are: correspondence between members, developing likely inquiries, preparing your home for an exchange, writing Home Exchange and Car Exchange Agreements, and creating a Home Exchange Book which provides visiting guests with detailed information about your home and its idiosyncrasies, emergency contacts and phone numbers, recommended local restaurants and attractions, plus much, much more.

Samples of these documents are incorporated in the e-book, plus purchasers can download actual working copies in Microsoft Word and PDF formats from the e-books website.

May potential home exchangers marvel at the notion of vacationing almost anywhere in the world, without ever having to pay for accommodation, but because of reservations about allowing ?strangers? into their home, they continually resist making a commitment and joining a club themselves. I think this e-book does an exemplary job of allaying all those unfounded fears. As the Ms. Rickby so succinctly states:

?The question I'm most often asked by the uninitiated is: How do you trust complete strangers to live in your home for two weeks?

My response is usually concise and along the lines of: ?How do they know they can trust me??

I think those words speak volumes!

I especially like the author's clearly expressed decision not to promote any current club above another within her book. She chooses not to reveal which clubs she herself belongs to and never so much as mentions any club by name. Instead, she walks her readers through how to search for, and list all the current clubs by dint of Google, Yahoo, etc. Surely, this tactic alone will keep her e-book fresh for significantly longer than would otherwise be possible, plus no club can feel slighted or complain because they have been left out.