Students
When we choose a host family especially for you, we follow two simple steps.
1. We find out what you are looking for.
At CHI we arrange a personalized match between you and your Canadian host, based on your backgrounds, interests, lifestyles, and educational goals. We want to know what you expect of yourself and your experience in homestay, your background, what you like to do in your free time.
What you like to eat, whether you like pets, and so on.
The information you give us in your application helps us select the host who is most likely to meet your expectations.
2. We search year-round for the best hosts and host families.
Our hosts represent a variety of Canadian lifestyles and experience. To ensure they are compatible with your background and experiences, we ask each of our hosts to complete a detailed application like yours.
This is why the process of finding your host begins a long time before you arrive in Canada. Our standards of host recruitment are recognized as the highest in Canada. We visit interested hosts in person, in their homes, and carefully inspect their house. We discuss their interest in international students, their professions, lifestyle, and hobbies. We discuss in detail our expectations for the kind of care and attention you will need.
We follow simple rules to ensure that we are not working with hosts who are interested only in money. We do not allow more other students who speak the same language as you in your homestay. All of our host applications require both personal references and a criminal records check.
Once we have approved a host, we stay in close contact with them. We ask our students to evaluate their homestay experience in writing, and we review their evaluations with their hosts. We organize workshops to teach our hosts about different cultures and to talk about their experiences as hosts.
We're so popular among hosts, that we find more than 66% of our new hosts through word of mouth.