Today I’m very happy to announce the new Homestays add-on for StudyStays.
The Homestays add-on gives you a website for managing Homestay accommodation for international students. It fits in nicely alongside your existing Off Campus Accommodation website, making use of the admin interface that you’re already familiar with.
Some key features are:
- Guests (students) can apply for a homestay matching their preferences and requirements
- Hosts can self-manage their homestay, including details about living arrangements, features, preferences and availability
- Guests are matched with the best homestays for them using a scoring system.
- Guests can either request a homestay themselves, or have one assigned by an administrator
- Agents can manage homestays on behalf of their students
- Group bookings help you easily manage study or tour groups.
- Auto Assignment automatically assigns the best matches for groups
- Automatic email notifications to help streamline the application and placement process
- Comprehensive admin tools for managing guests, hosts, homestay placements, applications, agents and groups.
- Customisable forms (e.g. for Guest and Host registration) and scoring rules for matching guests with homestays
- Customisable to suit your procedures for recording host orientation, inspections and payments.
- Off Campus students and providers can use the same login for the Homestay website
The Homestays add-on has had almost two years of development and testing in collaboration with QUT and Griffith University. Thanks to their innovation and patience, we’ve gotten to the point where we have a solid product for other universities to use “out of the box”.
The Homestays add-on is available now for everyone using StudyStays. For anyone signing up in 2017, we have a special rate of $9000 for the first year (ex GST). There is also a “Light” version available with some limitations for a lower rate.
I’ll be writing in more detail about Homestays over the coming weeks. If you’d like to be notified about new posts, you can subscribe to this blog by email below. I look forward to telling you about all the exciting features!