Exchanging houses can mean affordable travel with a personal touch. Just be sure you're a homeowner who can handle it. If you want your sheets changed daily, your breakfast delivered to your room or even the reassurance of knowing the toilet has been sanitized, you may be a candidate for an overnight stay in one of the 48,000 properties that populate the U.S. lodgings landscape ...

Travel industry reports forecast a dark winter for the travel industry, but FlipKey.com, a leading vacation rental website, indicates this doesn't necessarily spell a down season for the whole ski industry.

Vacation rentals are big business. HomeAway, which owns a dozen or so vacation home listing sites, just raised $250 million in a venture round that values the company at more than $1 billion. But listings are spread across lots of sites - what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It's also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites ...