Forget about agency, what really matters is LCC. Find out which agencies serve your area, then ask for contact information for their LCC (or whatever they call their person in your local area). You need to find out how many families they have, talk to other families in the cluster and ask how the LCC is about mediating with HF/AP and how the LCC is about removing an AP if there’s rematch due to safety concerns (you do NOT want to be required to host an AP going into rematch for something that involved harming your child).

We had a very good experience with Au Pair in America - had three wonderful au pairs through this agency.

There is an Au Pair chatroom on the Nanny forum.

I've tried Cultural Care first. It was a very painful process b/c they allow host families and aps each 6 connections. You can only interview with aps who connect with you, so these aps are simultaneously interviewing wit 6 families. I could not count how many aps I've reached out to never even bothered to respond. After a frustrating and fruitless search, I switched to Au Pair Care. Their process favors host families slightly more. HFs can interview 3 aps at any given time, while each ap can only interview with 2 families. Basically, it forces aps to make decisions relatively quickly, whereas the CC model allows aps to shop around for perks.

Anyone have any recommendations or warnings for au pair agencies? We're considering the au pair route for next year (not diving in now with all the J1 visa mess) and have been told all the agencies are more or less the same. If anyone has used more than one - or has a warning or strong endorsement for a particular agency - I'd love to hear it.