Accommodation Options for ECI's Study Abroad Summer Trips
Our Programs include a variety of accommodation types depending on the choice of trip.
We make every effort to include only the highest quality accommodations for our study abroad programs in Spain, France and Costa Rica. ECI representatives visit each hotel and student dorm before including them in our trips.
Additionally, we work closely with our partner language schools to ensure that the Homestay families they provide are acceptable to ECI. All immersion week host families are carefully hand-chosen by trained ECI program coordinators, many of whom are high school teachers in their respective countries.
Language School Homestay
In each course town during the weeks of classes, the most common housing option is the Language School Homestay. Our partner language schools arrange host families who provide room & board and a safe environment for our students. Most of these families live within a fifteen-minute walk of the center of the course town and language schools. In larger course towns families may be located up to a twenty-minute walk or short bus ride away.
Some families are made up of father, mother & children, but many have no children of their own living at home, or are single-parent households. They often live in modest apartments, and like most European households, air conditioning is rare. Many times, students from other countries share a family with our ECI participants, adding to the international flavor of the Homestay experience. Generally, we place two ECI students together per household.
Although our language School Homestay families are carefully chosen and provide comfortable, safe and friendly accommodations, this kind of housing option is not a total immersion experience. For this reason the majority of our study abroad programs provide the opportunity for our students to immerse themselves fully in the culture and language of France and Spain by including a unique True Immersion Week during the third week of the program.
True Immersion Week
Unlike Language School Homestay families, Immersion Week families are all volunteers and provide one of the key components of our trips – the opportunity for our students to spend one week in an intensive language-learning situation, speaking only in the target language of French or Spanish. There are no group activities during this week, and students will spend the entire week living the life of a French or Spanish teenager. In order to achieve this goal of total immersion in the true sense, we at ECI spend a lot of time choosing the right kind of families, those whose motivation is to welcome a student from the US into their home in order to share their culture and make a lifelong family friend.
All meals are provided by the family, students are placed one per family, and will either be in a room of their own or will share with a host family sibling.
For details about our True Immersion Week, please read our dedicated page.
A Note About Diet
All of our host families will do their best to accommodate any special dietary restrictions (medical, religious or self-imposed) which you plan to continue abroad. If you are a vegetarian, please note that this way of eating is generally less common and well understood in Europe than in the US. Regardless of your current eating habits, it is very important to be extremely flexible about what you eat while living abroad.
Dorm Accommodation
Centrally located, the student dorms we select are very near to the language schools. ECI chaperones live with the students in the dorms, share meals together, and are therefore able to form close bonds and relationships of trust and mutual respect with the students.
Students are usually placed two to a room, and eat all or the majority of their meals at the dorm, often in the dining hall. There are usually laundry facilities and communal areas. Please note that student dorms generally do not have air conditioning.
Aix-en-Provence programs – St. Eloi dorm
Hotels
During travel portions, students stay in hotels. ECI hotels are always a minimum of 3-star, with many being of 4-star quality. Students share in twins or triples. We make every effort to choose hotels that are centrally located and in safe areas. All hotel accommodations include breakfast and dinners are either provided at the hotel or a nearby restaurant. Wherever possible we choose hotels that have air conditioning.
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