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An online service that allows homeowners rent out their swimming pools for a few hours has picked up some 16,000 subscribers in France.

Swimmy - - has been described as the Airbnb of pools. It allows subscribers to rent the pools of private homeowners for several hours at a time.

One user from Paris told news website Franceinfo that she wanted to celebrate her birthday with friends in a private pool and found one quickly via the site after entering 'pool for rent' into a search engine.

The couple from whom she hired the pool have been renting it out regularly for a year - for a rate of €27 per person per half-day - other owners rent their pools at different rates. They said that groups have sometimes been noisy, but there has been no trouble - and the money they have earned allowed them to buy a new heat pump for the pool.

The biggest problem, they said, was not being able to use their pool as often as they would have liked during the summer heatwave because it was in use.