Will agency pay for return ticket if AP leaves early?

[Anonymous]

If I had to guess, I would wager that our kids' AP will ask to return home in the next few weeks. Her homesickness continues to linger after 4 months - while we had a nice holiday, her spirits were fairly subdued throughout the week. She has an easy schedule, good kids, and a set of friends but none of it eclipses her emotions. Feel sad for her. This is our first AP. Will the agency cover her return ticket if she does not complete?

[Anonymous]

No, they will not. We just had this happen.

[Anonymous]

So who pays?

[Anonymous]

She has to pay herself.

[Anonymous]

Au pairs arrive with a return ticket. All they do is change the return date

[Anonymous]

Is every au pair agency identical with this issue?

[Anonymous]

I don't know. I can say with Cultural Care, they have to pay themselves, I know this because I was trying to help out a friend of our au pair.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Au pairs arrive with a return ticket. All they do is change the return date

Not true.

I had an AP leave at 10 months. She had to pay for it herself.

They get a one way ticket here. The agency pays for their ticket only if they complete their year.

[Anonymous]

Seems like a simple thing you could ask your agency, OP. But I know that APIA and CC will not cover her flight home during her first year if she leaves early. I personally think it's a good policy having just experienced an au pair that decided she couldn't handle the homesickness and left pretty quickly. You expect a level of commitment to the program for a one-year period. If someone just decides they don't want to do it anymore and goes home, I don't have an issue with them paying. Now if someone is with a bad family or something, they can rematch. So no one is stuck in a bad situation.

Here's a question - what if the host family requests rematch and then the au pair doesn't find someone in two weeks - then who pays her flight?

[Anonymous]

Looks like you've got these poor girls over a barrel.

[Anonymous]

Au pairs pay to be part of the program. An agency cannot leave an au pair stranded in the country without a flight home

[Anonymous]

We had an ap who was kicked out of the program but who refused to book her ticket home. We housed her but didn't have her work (she was a huge safety issue all around), so it was a huge inconvenience to us to keep having her in our house. After two weeks when she still refused to leave, the agency finally bought her a ticket and the Lcc personally took her to the airport to get her home. It was horrible having her in our house that long (when they are rematching it's one thing to have them two weeks but if they are being sent home, they are supposed to go in a few days), and I think the agency finally realized she was never leaving if they didn't take matters into their own hands. You can imagine how annoying it was to see her coming in each day with shopping bags from outings nearby when I had to house her and hire an outside babysitter to care for my children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had an ap who was kicked out of the program but who refused to book her ticket home. We housed her but didn't have her work (she was a huge safety issue all around), so it was a huge inconvenience to us to keep having her in our house. After two weeks when she still refused to leave, the agency finally bought her a ticket and the Lcc personally took her to the airport to get her home. It was horrible having her in our house that long (when they are rematching it's one thing to have them two weeks but if they are being sent home, they are supposed to go in a few days), and I think the agency finally realized she was never leaving if they didn't take matters into their own hands. You can imagine how annoying it was to see her coming in each day with shopping bags from outings nearby when I had to house her and hire an outside babysitter to care for my children.

Your nightmare sounds so unreal. Something tells me you're not telling which agency, right?

[Anonymous]

Wow pp. That frightens me. Did you see this personality beforehand? It's easier to say from my angle of course, but why could you not have her removed from your house?

[Anonymous]

It was au pair care, and much had to do with the ineptitude of the area director, who was new and actually our fourth in three months because they all kept quitting. We left that agency following that awful experience (there were other issues with them too) and have been very happy now with Apia.