Hosting FAQs
Joining WFH
The first step is to get in touch with us. You can do this via our website, email, telephone or Facebook page.
Once you’ve provided us with your details, a member of our team will reach out to learn a little more about you and provide you with more details.
If you’re happy with everything, we will arrange for a home visit.
During your home visit, your local coordinator will come round to meet you in person, run through the process in more detail and check that your property is suitable for hosting.
We’re not looking for Ritz or Hilton-standard rooms, just clean, comfortable and safe spaces for our visitors to stay.
Following your home visit, you will be required to complete our free safeguarding course and get an enhanced DBS if you don’t have one already.
We can arrange the DBS check for you – this costs £60.
After all of this is completed, you will be a fully-onboarded host family.
To become a host family, you will need an enhanced DBS check.
If you don’t already have an enhanced DBS, we can arrange one for you – this costs £60.
Hosting is completely flexible, but it makes it much easier to allocate students when we know your availability in advance.
It’s okay if your availability changes, please just let us know with as much notice as possible.
The simple answer is YES!
We want to give the groups a diverse range of experiences which they can then share with their friends and teachers.
As long as you meet our criteria, then your age, gender, ethnic background or relationship status really doesn’t matter.
General FAQs
We’re a long-established company, having been around since 2010!
We currently have 4 centres, these are:
We’re excited to open our Frome centre in 2025!
You can learn more about each centre on our centres page.
Hosting FAQs
Drop off is never later than 7:40am, and pick up is no earlier than 6:30pm – making hosting easy to fit around all types of working schedules.
Each centre has a designated drop off point. You can find out yours on your centre’s web page.
Hosts aren’t required to cook extravagant or complex meals for dinner. Simple dishes such as pizza and chips, bangers and mash, pesto pasta and fish fingers and beans are absolutely fine.
We typically allocate our student groups 4-5 weeks in advance. So you’ll always know well ahead of time how many students you have and when.
If one of your students falls ill, they will still go out on their school trip as normal.
We realise that it’s a bit scary to start with as you don’t really know what to expect. Will the company like me? Will the students like me? Will they look after my home? What will happen if I have any problems? These are all questions that everyone is worried about when they think about starting their hosting journey.
At WHF, every team member is also an experienced host. We have all been there in your shoes so we know exactly how it feels – and that is why we pride ourselves on giving you a superb package of support from the time you first contact us for information or a chat, through to your Home Visit and the in-depth Welcome Pack we talk you through and leave with you for reference.
It doesn’t stop there. Our coordinators will be there 24/7 if you need any advice whilst the group are with us – and because we do everything exactly the same for each group, you will soon get used to how we work and how you need to organise yourself during the stay.
But don’t take our word for it, take a peek at our Host Reviews to see what they really say about hosting.
If you are still not sure and would like to have a chat with one of our new or long-standing hosts rather than a staff member, then just get in touch via the contact us page and we will ask one of them to give you a call.
We pay hosts £19 per student per night for full-board (breakfast, lunch, and dinner).
This means you would earn the following amounts depending on how many students you can host.
2 Students
- 3 nights: £114
- 4 nights £152
- 5 nights £190
3 Students
- 3 nights: £171
- 4 nights: £228
- 5 nights: £285
4 Students
- 3 nights: £228
- 4 nights: £304
- 5 nights: £380
Our Spring season runs from February to the middle of July and our Autumn season from September to early December – but you don’t have to host every group, making it very flexible.
The students and their teachers generally arrive by coach on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday evening and stay for 3-5 nights at a time. Then the following week we have new groups arriving.
The children are staying in your home and must respect it.
If (for any reason) your group cause any concern, you can call your Group Coordinator, who will make contact with their teacher/group leader to resolve the issue.