This year we joined a travel club called THIRDHOME, and it’s been a big game changer for how we plan and go on trips! Check out this episode to learn more about what THIRDHOME is, how we use it, and recommendations we have if you’re thinking about it.
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Transcript
Jess: Welcome to the Jetsetting Family travel podcast. I’m Jess and I’m Rod, and we are excited to be back guys. We are finally moved in to our home in Mexico. It’s been a little bit of a hiatus or just like not as consistent the last couple of weeks.
Rod: And we have been crazy busy. So our apologies for those of you that tuned in over these past two weeks on Tuesdays.
And didn’t see a podcast episode from us. I know it’s Thursday now, so…
Jess: It’s just moving from one country to the other. I think it was harder this time because we’re not homeschooling. So trying to get like the school situated, the uniform, like there was just a whole process and it became more overwhelming than we anticipated.
And so, you know, as we were juggling life, we dropped some balls,
Rod: But now we’re here and we’re back. We’re settling in and we’re ready to get back into this regular rhythm of podcast episodes. And today what we’re talking about is this awesome travel club that is called THIRDHOME. I know we featured it in our Instagram and some of our trips for like the Martha’s Vineyard episode that we had a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve been getting a lot of questions as to what is THIRDHOME.
How can I do it? What are the benefits of it? So we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into it. And I think what we can get started is what, what is THIRDHOME Jess?
Jess: So THIRDHOME is a luxury travel club that I randomly stumbled upon. And I had heard about it through Friends and family, but I really wasn’t that intrigued.
Like I wasn’t that interested to look into it myself. And when I finally looked into it, I was super intrigued and told Rod, we need to try this out. And here’s how it works. So for THIRDHOME, like the name insinuates, you have to have another property. So this could either be something as a vacation home you own or an Airbnb you operate.
Maybe even if you left your main home vacant for like the summers. You could possibly do it there. But essentially is you’re allocating weeks for the travel club to list their members of your property. And when people book the weeks that you have listed, you earn something called keys. And keys is essentially a currency within the THIRDHOME club and the keys you earn are typically allocated so like your home is given a key range.
So we have a home that has a key range of 2 keys to 6 keys per se. And on the high season, so maybe spring break, Christmas, Thanksgiving, we’re going to be earning six keys any week someone books our place. And on a lower season, you earn two keys. Well, how this works is, in return, you can search the thousands of homes on their travel club, and you can book homes around the world with, based on the number of keys you have.
So, like, some homes are incredible. We stayed at a gorgeous home in Martha’s Vineyard, and it was only, I believe it was two keys?
Rod: It was, yeah, something really low,
Jess: Really low. So we were able to do that. Other homes, they might be 12 keys, which means I would have to give two weeks of my home at peak season in order to book their home.
But some of these homes guys are like mega mansions. We would never, ever, ever be able to utilize or get into without the use of THIRDHOME. They’re great for planning large family vacations. And so how it works is when you book with THIRDHOME, when you’re paying with the keys that you’ve earned by putting your property on the calendar. And that’s something that’s really cool is whether someone books your home or not, as long as you allocate those weeks to THIRDHOME, I believe it’s two months in advance, right? You will receive the keys, whether it’s booked or not booked. So it’s like, as long as you give people enough time to book it and you’re putting it on the calendar, you’ll get those keys and then you can start booking your stays.
But at the end of the day, when you book it, you’re paying the keys. So it’s whatever the key value is. And then there’s usually a flat rate fee for the entire week, and this can usually vary from a few hundred to 1500 dollars.
Right. And that money goes to THIRDHOME just for their expenses of their own. I mean, their company, they’re profiting as well. So you’re paying a fee to them. So some of the stays we’ve had have been usually around $700 for the whole week. So it comes out to be about a hundred dollars a night plus our keys.
So, I mean there is kind of the opportunity cost that you lost at renting your property. Yeah, but I mean this Martha Vineyard home we stayed at was typically renting at $1,200 a night or more, and our family was able to go stay the week for $700 for the whole week.
Rod: Yes. These, these rentals all come in seven day stretches.
Right. So it has to be a full week rental. So I think there’s in terms of navigating and the tips and tricks of getting the most value out of it is you want to make sure that you’re looking for places where you’re going to want to spend the full week there for us. We’re travelers, typically travel quickly.
And when we’re going from 1 place to another, we’re doing 2 to 3 nights at a time, but it’s for us using THIRDHOME to settle down and really dive deep into a location. That’s why that’s where the 7 days or 7 nights really comes in handy because it gives us that home base that we can use to explore.
And a lot of the times there’s just so many amenities at the THIRDHOME itself that you can take advantage of. So you can choose to be as adventurous or as a homebody as you want to be. And it really is up to you what you want to do with that vacation. Yes.
Jess: So THIRDHOME for us has been this incredible opportunity to stay at beautiful places around the world that without putting our home or our Airbnb on this exchange property, it’s just giving us access to this library of homes that we could stay at for an affordable price that’s in our range. So it’s using what you own as leverage, I guess, to explore the world. And it’s so cool.
Cause when you search on THIRDHOME, you can put in like a date range or how many rooms you’re looking for in a location, and there are some incredible. Just stays around the world.
Rod: Yeah. I think THIRDHOME has partnerships with a lot of hotels and resorts around the world. So a lot of resorts in Mexico they’ve partnered with.
So you get some of their really beautiful rooms or room types for a really great rate at a relatively low key value all over Mexico. That’s something that we have our eyes on now that we’re here. To be able to explore some more of this beautiful country and stay at some great resorts without having to pay these really hefty fees to be able to stay there.
Jess: Yeah, and I do think that you’re going to see a mix of resorts. So like Vidanta is like a big one in Mexico, but you’ll also see some places listed like Ritz Carlton Clubs, Atlantis, and a lot of times what you’re seeing there is people own timeshares. At these different locations and they’re putting their time share up on THIRDHOME and then you’ll see normal like apartments in like down like, you know, in Times Square or in Central Park, New York, or like the heart of London and then you’ll see enormous mega mansions throughout the world.
So there’s a big variety. Of what you could do. For us, we always try to look for like, how can we maximize and get the most bang for a buck? So like the lowest keys, to stay somewhere. But if you’re doing like a huge family reunion, they even have like private islands in Belize you can rent where it’s like the whole islands to yourself.
So there’s just so many cool opportunities. Through the THIRDHOME. There’s also something I forgot to mention, and I just thought of it called keyless stays. And so how that works is every time your home is actually booked and stayed in. So when you list your home on the site, you get the key value, whether someone books or not, when someone.
Ends up booking it. You get something called a keyless token. It’s like the golden ticket. Yeah. And so what happens is, is if you are a last minute planner, typically you’ll see these homes pop up between 30 and 45 days before your travel. Homes even with high key values, like a 10 key value, will go keyless.
And so all you need for that home is your keyless token that you’ve earned when someone booked your home, and then you pay the administration fee again. And so the keyless tokens, if you’re actually booking out your home, is a great way to get into some of these really expensive key value homes. Yep. At like a very low, I guess, cost to somebody.
Rod: Yeah. Yeah. And if you want to roll the dice and within 30 days, right, if a keyless opportunity pops up and you have the flexibility to be able to go visit, it’s totally a great value.
Jess: It is. And we have found the nice thing about this is the people that are in THIRDHOME are typically really respectful of your property.
They’re extremely easy guests. And so like that part, we haven’t. Not had any issues with right. And I think something to know, I think the one I wouldn’t say a negative necessarily, but like the big hurdle is they do have entry requirements to get your home into THIRDHOME. And so I feel like for us on 1 of our properties, we kind of lucked out because we bought like a lower market and as the market.
Increased the value of the home now qualified for the club. It probably wouldn’t have when we purchased it, but you know, things in Florida have gone wild, but I believe the typical requirement is it must be 500, 000 must be the value of the property to be considered to enter. And so I do think that that has made it, you don’t see as many like young party people like Airbnb.
It’s, it’s, it’s not as hit or miss with the type of renters you’re going to get.
Rod: Yeah, you’re generally going to have people that have been to a lot of places and know what to expect and you keep it up the communication. So, for example, when we went to Martha’s Vineyard, the host emailed us with a very detailed list of recommendations for where to go visit. What are the things to do? What are the best places to eat at? So we were able to keep in touch and say, Hey, we visited this. This was a great, do you have any recommendations for beaches for the kids? And he was very responsive. So it was super awesome to have that kind of relationship, which sometimes Airbnb and it’s being managed by a property manager or by somebody that owns a hundred rental properties and you’re not really getting the kind of personalized attention to it. You really do get that here. So, yeah, we were super, super excited and had an awesome time with our THIRDHOME stays.
Jess: Yeah. So let’s go into, just to give you guys an example of Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, this was our first big THIRDHOME stay.
And I was a little nervous, like, what do we really expect? And guys. It has to be actually one of my favorite places we’ve stayed in the U S in the sense that we had this gorgeous home, like a block from the beach in Martha’s Vineyard, and we were able to invite friends because this home house, eight people.
And so you figure, I think the cost for this one was 700 for the week. So each family paid 350 bucks roughly for the whole week. And it was, just an incredible place because the home itself was large and had a kitchen and a living room.
Rod: Three story townhome. So first story you have, right, the living room, the kitchen, you have a walkout patio to this beautiful field.
And the second floor, you had three bedrooms. And then in the third floor was like an, uh, like an additional bonus space with another bedroom there. So it was plenty of space. We had, yeah, eight people there, a bunch of kids. And it was super nice because we also had access to what was called the Winnetu resort there.
So this property was part of the Winnetu resort. And by even being there for a week as part of a THIRDHOME stay, we had access to all of their amenities, which included, they had a pool. They had a bunch of outdoor games. They had ping pong, foosball, the big giant chess. And just activities for the kids, a kid’s club.
I mean, there was, even if we didn’t want to explore Martha’s Vineyard, we probably could have had just a great time staying around that Winnetu resort, hanging around and lounging at the town home. And it was just.
Jess: It was so amazing. They did fire truck rides with the kids, s’mores, cookies. I mean, it was a kid heaven.
It was perfect for families. It gave us a little mix of everything. And the kids club even offered like on certain nights of the week, they did like date night kids club. So they did like movies and pizzas with the kids that we could take their shuttle into town and go to dinner and to a bar and then to come back and pick them up.
And so it was the perfect place to relax as kids or as a family. We got a mix of like family time, couple time, friend time. Amazing. And, you know, that was one of those places where that hotel is frankly, very expensive and pricey. And like, thanks to this club, we were able to go. And then from there we went to an extremely large home that I really only booked because I was intrigued one. I thought maybe we’d check it out to have like a group event later and it was very low key value. So I’m always looking for like, where can I use my keys and get the most bang for my key value. And this one was, it was a home that fit the 20,
Rod: 22 people, I think it was absolutely massive.
Jess: It was insane. It was just like room after room. If you think of like the dream house to play hide and seek in.
Rod: This would be it. Oh yeah. And we did that with the kids and I think we were originally planning on doing a big group trip there and we ended up just, things kind of fell through and we had to shift some things around here and there.
So we ended up going on our own. It’s the four of us in this massive house. So just to give you like a little visual cue of it. When you walk in, it’s like this mountain lodge, right? It’s in the Catskills in New York. You have beautiful views, large fields and hills and mountains around you. But you walk in, it just looks like a mountain lodge.
There’s living rooms. There’s a nice kitchen. There’s a good like seating area, massive dining room with like 12 chairs and you go upstairs and that’s where the first set of bedrooms are. There’s like four bedrooms there. There’s an additional like kids loft area that has a few more beds there, but then there’s also a basement in the basement.
There’s like three more. There’s a massage room, I think, or I don’t know if it was a massage room. It was like a yoga studio, right? Yeah. I think this is, this place is used for like healthy, retreats. Yeah. So then the basement was there, but also there’s like this other annex that’s attached to the house on the side where there’s two more bedrooms, but then even where that annex is above the garage There’s another set of stairs that takes you into this huge loft area above the garage where there’s like six more beds. So there was a ridiculous amount of space there.
We we actually really enjoyed just spending time walking around and playing hide and seek as Jess said, and trying to figure out like, whoa, who could we invite here the next time that we come and visit? And it was really, really special. And it’s not something that I don’t think we would have ever considered or thought to do if it hadn’t popped up as a THIRDHOME availability.
So that was really cool.
Jess: And I think on my list of like top places to go next is there’s a really cool THIRDHOME in Medellin, Colombia, which if you’ve heard our podcast. We had an incident last time we were there that made it less than enjoyable. Not at the THIRDHOME, but in the city of Medellin, where we all got the stomach flu and we all were really sick.
So we want to go back and have a beautiful experience there. There was one in downtown London, like in the heart of London, and then there’s one in the heart of New York City. And then there’s a couple that are like out there in like Norway. And so I’m always scouting. I feel like before THIRDHOME, every morning I’d wake up and look at Zillow as if I’m going to buy a home.
I’m not, I just love property. And so now the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is kind of see there’s an email that comes out if you’re a member and it’ll tell you new THIRDHOME listings or new THIRDHOME dates available. And so some of these go really quickly. And so I love being able to see like, oh my gosh, what’s popped up for the day.
And it’s like my morning routine now is to look at different THIRDHOME stays because I think the program. If you qualify, I think is so worth looking into because I think it just opens a cool opportunity to stay at unique places that typically aren’t
Rod: listed else. Yeah. We’ve got our eyes on this mountain lodge and the Italian Dolomites.
We were even just looking up, okay, where would we fly in? It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive through the mountains to get to this area. Where’s the nearest town by there? So we’re creating these like vacation plans without fully committing to booking yet, because our schedule is so hectic that we don’t really have like the, not the flexibility, but just like committing to a date when there’s so many opportunities.
I think it’s, it’s a good problem to have. But yeah, I think we’re really excited to, to go and check out a couple of more of these THIRDHOME places we’re looking at. We’ve got New York city on our list to go back to potentially in the winter, so then we can experience kind of what the city is like during the Christmas season and the holidays.
So we’ve got our eyes on that. Got like a little alert when something in New York city pops up and it’s a good key value that can house the four of us then that’s probably the next thing that we’re going to book, unless something new and random pops up.
Jess: To be honest, I’m kind of sad that I wasn’t in THIRDHOME when we full time traveled.
Because even like in Southeast Asia, Australia, there’s different places. And I think for us now, there’s so many cool opportunities and places to go, but it’s just hard for our schedule because the kids are in school. Whereas when we were full time traveling, I would have loved to have seen like how many.
Like how many places could we have stayed on THIRDHOME back-to-back to back-to-back before needing to get a hotel at Airbnb to do one week trips throughout. But overall guys, I can’t speak highly enough so far about the program. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m really excited to see what opportunities it opens for us in the future.
And we’re excited to share more of our THIRDHOME stays throughout the next few years.
Rod: Yeah, yeah. So we’ll definitely link some more resources. I think we’ve got some content on our website that we’ve written about whether THIRDHOME is worth it. We’ll send a couple of our Instagram reels from the places that we stayed at.
So you can get a good idea as to what those places look like. And then we also have a referral code. I think it gives you an extra keyless token, or there’s, you know, there’s a little benefit if you come in. Yeah, two keys to sign up. So we’ll have that referral link there, but if you have any questions on, you know, what THIRDHOME is, or if you’re curious or interested in potentially doing that.
Then you can always reach out to us. You can find us on Instagram @thejetsettingfamily. You can email us at [email protected] and we’d be happy to help. Yeah, we love serving this community and finding cool and new ways to travel and THIRDHOME is something that we’ve really been diving into this year.
So it’s been a fun time. And if you’ve got any other cool, like resources or travel styles or types, then always reach out and let us know. So then we can highlight it to the community as well.
Jess: Yes. So I hope you guys definitely check all those resources out. And I hope that starting every Tuesday again, we will be here for you guys to tune into the kids start school soon.
So life might be a little bit back to normal, even though we’re in a new location. So, yeah. It’s an exciting time in our life as we made the move to Mexico, which will probably feature on a future podcast. Oh yeah.
Rod: Yeah. I mean, making the move internationally, you know, even if it’s somewhat temporary or maybe not, who knows, we’ll see, but yeah, we’ve, we’ve got a lot of things that we’ve learned from that.
So we’re excited to highlight that on a future episode.
Jess: So until then guys, Happy Jetsetting!
