The Au pair Dilemma: should I trust an online-Family or go through an agency?

A lot of people have asked me this before. Should I go through an agency, or is an Au pair website safe enough for meeting a family?

I'll start with my experience. When I began the adventure of doing research on Au pair stuff, I made a profile only in two websites:

1. Find Au pair
and
2. Au pair Agency

Now, of course I read information from dozens of pages, but I couldn't make profiles on all of them, since that would have taken a lot of time. The first site requires you to pay a certain amount of money, -back then I think I paid like 15 Euros for a 3-month deal; and they also have a full-year membership. They let you see the profiles of the families, but in order to see their contact info, you have to pay for it. Findaupair.com is not an agency, it is only a tool for meeting families and contacting them directly.

On the other hand, I didn't want to pay for an agency like Mex-Aupair (for Au pairs who are going from Mexico) because that was too expensive for me (the cost of the agency  was 500 dollars then). I looked for an agency that wouldn't charge au pairs when they were looking for a family. That is how I found the second website. Aupair-agency.com is an online agency based in Great Britain. The family looking for an Au pair pays for the service while the Au pair doesn't have to. Anyway, after talking to my former host-family from Germany, they said they were not happy with the online-agency's service. But it if wasn't for that website, I would've never gotten the fabulous family that I did.

How did I do it?


So here it goes:

I am kind of adventurous, so I tried meeting a family online. I found a family (or actually the family found me) through aupair-agency.com. The good thing is I got to talk to them on the phone, and we exchanged pictures, and shared stuff about ourselves before I went over to Germany. Many people asked me if I was scared something would go wrong, or that the family wouldn't be nice, that I'd be stuck somewhere in a foreign country, or someone would kidnap me. And no, I wasn't scared... but maybe I should've been.

There are so many things that could go wrong with being an Au pair. But in the cases I've seen, sometimes even going through an agency doesn't guarantee that you'll get a nice family to work with. When I was living in Frankfurt, I met some Latin American girls who had come through an agency called Montoya. I heard so many stories about nightmare families as well as about irresponsible Au pairs... Many of the girls changed families very often because they weren't happy with the family they got - or the family didn't like them. Even speaking with other Au pairs, from the Ukraine and Russia, for example, I discovered that having an intermediary helps, but it doesn't guarantee that the relationship with your host-family will be great.

Stay tuned for more info about Au pairs, how to find a family, and what the best choices for you are!  Feel free to subscribe!

Take care!

+Notes: Picture