Welcome and thank you for visiting our site which helps host families and foreign students find their ideal partnership.
We are Matt and Fiona Kitchen from Nottinghamshire in the UK. We have two children who we home school leaving us free to travel at the drop of a hat, should we wish to do so. Both children are very used to having foreign speaking visitors around as we have been hosting students all of their lives. Currently they are learning to speak French, German, Portuguese and Spanish but are known to have had a go at Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian and Russian when it’s been seen as worth trying (for an ice cream etc).
For several years on an annual basis we organised around a thousand international foreign students to visit Nottinghamshire, finding and introducing them to their ideal host family. These trips were often on behalf of agents, both UK and overseas and required a large amount of organisation, long hours and often a lot of patience.
Our mission was to organise host families and teachers who really cared about the welfare of students, treating each student as one of their own family. Because of this, our centre flourished. Each year we were always pressed by agents to take on more students which meant hiring more teachers and finding more host families. Many students revisited our centres because of the high quality of our host families and many came because of recommendations from visitor students from previous years.
It isn’t always easy to find a host family or language teacher with similar interests and hobbies and that is why Matt decided to build this site; so that each student can view each family and choose a family who is most suited to them.
We worked hard to keep our relationship with host families excellent, and families stuck with us year after year because we felt we were a team. It isn’t always easy; some students are not nice and you have no way of knowing the character of the student, or host beforehand if you have no interaction with the student or host prior to arrival.
From the host’s point of view, by using xilfee.eu, you can see the students who are looking for host families and then decide when a student applies to you if they will fit in with your lifestyle.
Through our site you can also set your own rates of pay for both hosting and if you wish to do so, for teaching as well.
Nowadays, we don’t work from 5am in the morning until midnight matching host families to students. Instead we work our own hours, (which can vary depending where in the world we happen to be :-) organising the background running and day to day aspects of the site. We check each and every person who builds a profile and we decide whether or not the profile is genuine by reading the information carefully. Safety is of paramount importance to us here and we want all of you to be safe.
We hope that you enjoy using Xilfee and find your perfect host or student.
Xilfee Admin Team
