By on January 1st, 2016

Why Homestays Are the Best Option for Groups

When organizing trips for groups of international students to go to the United States, you may be tempted to rent a block of apartments or to try to find a decent rate for a similar block of rooms in an extended stay hotel. You may even want to try to get dorms for your students in on-campus housing. However, all of these options are problematic for a number of reasons.

Most apartments are unfurnished, and property management firms expect you to sign at least a year’s lease. Even extended stay lodgings can cause problems when they have minimum stays, and if they don’t have minimum stays they may just be entirely too expensive for your program or your students to afford.

Staying in on-campus dormitories might seem like a great option, too, but most universities with on-campus housing are already overbooked. Many even have waiting lists for full-time students who want to get housing on campus, so reserving a block of rooms for just a few days, weeks, or months out of the school year is unfair to those students and doesn’t make sense for the universities, either.

Even if you could find a block of rooms for your students, having everyone stay together isn’t necessarily the best idea, either. For the most part, students traveling to the US want to improve their English skills and get to know the culture here. When you group them together, all in the same housing block, they’re going to tend to gravitate toward one another instead of speaking more English and getting to know new people in the US. Even though they want to learn more and they’re paying to come to the US and do it, they’ll still tend to do what’s most comfortable, which is almost always hanging out with other international students like themselves.

When your students stay with host families, on the other hand, they’ll become more comfortable speaking English, and they’ll learn a lot more about the culture here. Now, you may be thinking, “Isn’t it going to be a hassle to find homestays for all of our students?” Not when you work with USH.

We have experience placing large and small groups of students in homestays near UC Irvine, ASU, UCLA, and other institutions in California, Arizona, and Florida. We make it easy to give your students the most valuable experience possible, whether your group is staying for a few days or a whole year.