homestay-abroad-students

Homestay: Do you know about this crisis?


Homestay is aiming to use its website to place the growing number of study abroad students with the right accommodations

homestay-abroad-studentsBetween now and 2020, the amount of students studying languages abroad is expected to increase from 4 to 7 million.

At the same time, overcrowded colleges and universities frequently face housing and accommodation shortages for even national students.

“Institutions are setting targets to have 15 percent of their student population come from international borders,” said Alan Clarke, CEO of Homestay.com. “Many are currently at 3 percent. What that brings with it is a requirement for students to find off-campus accommodation because there is probably a lack of sufficient accommodation on campus.”

Homestay is hoping to help ease that burden.

The Ireland-based company was founded in 2011 when its founders realized there wasn’t a technology that could easily support placing study abroad students with host families. It can also connect others looking to go abroad with a place to stay, but a large focus remains on changing the way students are placed in homestays.

The current techniques used by most universities are “intensely manual,” Clarke said.

(Next page: Matching 50 students with new homes with the click of a button)

“It’s also not very transparent,” he said. “Spanish students going to Ireland, or Irish students gong to Spain, the first time they see where they’re going to stay is when they turn up at the front door.”

Homestay works in two different ways to change that.

First, there’s the outwardly facing site that allows students to match and book a homestay. Students can use a series of filters to narrow down their search by country, city, and neighborhood, and then go even deeper by filtering for hobbies, interests, and amenities. They see what the hosts are like and photographs of the homes and bedrooms where they’ll be staying.

The student then sends that host a message, and the two chat over the site until the host thinks the guest will be a good fit.

Payment is generally handled through the guest and the host, but Clarke said the company is working on a way to facilitate payment through the site, allowing money to come out in weekly or monthly installments like a rent payment.

The college- and university-oriented platform, meanwhile, allows institutions to book accommodations on behalf of the students with an “automatch” feature.

“It can take a group of 50 students and match them to bookings with the click of a button,” Clarke said. “But even with that, there’s a whole lot of functionality and intelligence that lets them match interests with the profile of the host.”

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