Homestay Network turned 30 in 2017; we celebrated our pearl anniversary with Clients, Hosts and the team. 30 Years of continuous operation is an achievement for any organisation. It was an important milestone not just for us but Homestay in Australia.

Homestay Network formalised the process of delivering an in home accommodation offering for international students in Australia. Up to that point, it was an ad-hoc accommodation offering provided by people offering a room in their home to university students.

We have commissioned two modified logo’s to identify with and celebrate this anniversary:

Our founder went to great lengths to establish formalised processes and standards for determining the suitability of the accommodation for use by international students. As a company, we introduced the formality of requiring all hosts to have background checks and inspections before being accepted as a suitable host. We worked with education providers early on in our history to establish many of the standards the industry uses even today.

Today we still work in close collaboration with our education provider clients to continue enhancing the accommodation standards to deliver students the best possible experience our community offers.

We believe:

• We are the only homestay provider that offers face-to-face training to our hosts to ensure they understand what homestay accommodation is.
• A trained host is a better host.

Over the years we have seen great changes in the industry as entrants have come and gone. Homestay is about families, family members and people it is not an AirBnB or mix & match directory service. We believe the best way to match students with host families is to understand the needs and wants of both and to find a “best-match-host”. You can only do this by using people, no amount of machine capability can replace human understanding.

Our motto “placing students first since 1987” is more than just a tagline, it means everything to us, Students are the heart of our business. Without students, there would be no requirement for homestay as an accommodation option in the first place. We work hard to place students effectively and efficiently getting it right first time, every time – we have a 99% success rate. That is for every 100 students we place with a family we have 1 mismatch, we know we can’t get it right every time because we are dealing with people. We work to understand why that happened and what we can learn from that placement to improve our processes and procedures – we believe in continuous improvement.

Continuous improvement is what has made us the industry leader, along with the quality of our hosts and our employees.

We are looking forward to the next 30 years and taking you all with us on that remarkable journey.