Homestay Business Ideas | 10 Best Money Through Homestay
Men and Women who would like to apply their talents and skills in entertaining and accommodating guests seek a business at home.
There are many options and home-based business opportunities available and one of them is homestay. This is opening your house to paying guests.
What is a homestay?
According to Cheryl Verstraete, an experienced hostess, and author of Homestay 101 for Hosts, it’s a home-away-from-home. It is different from a hotel, a motel, or a bed and breakfast at home. The main purpose of the house is a residence and the secondary purpose is to open your house and offer a room for paying guests.
Anyone could be a host at home, but most of the time, women get involved in this type of home business because of the following reasons:
loves cooking and cooking and wants to show their talents and skills to guests; spend more time at home; want to focus more energy at home and on the family; seeks opportunity to meet people from different lifestyles and from other countries; earn additional income for the family, and open to learning other cultures.
The best way to know if you are in this home company is to evaluate yourself and your lifestyle.
Here are 10 questions you may ask yourself to know if you are into the home hosting business:
1 Do you like meeting new people from different cultures and countries?
2 Do you have spare rooms/s to accommodate your guests?
3 Do you like cooking and/or cooking for non-family members?
4 Can you stay calm when unexpected events and situations arise?
5 Are you, comfortable keeping strangers, in your home for a short or long time?
6 Do your home and community have a safe and healthy environment?
7 Are your family members open to the idea of living with guests under one roof?
8 Are you open to the beliefs, customs, and cultures of your guests?
9 Are you organized and systematic?
10 Are you and your family open to communicating and meeting the needs of your guests?
The hosting business is not for everyone. This kind of home-based business is challenging but rewarding and rewarding. If you answered yes to all of the above questions, the homestay hosting business is for you.
If hosting isn’t for you, you may need to look more at what you’d like to do. The home-based business for women has increased 10 times in recent years and one of the biggest increases that have been seen is for women who are starting their own internet business.
Make Extra Money Through Homestay Hosting
Thinking of a stranger living in your home with your family may seem strange at first. But once you get used to the notion, it can be a great way to try new cultures and provide additional income.
Often, homestays are international students looking to study in their area and need lodging in a stable and friendly environment where they feel safe and can study in silence. Often the hosts of the house are mature couples with young or adult children and have an additional room to spare
Domestic stays can be visited from a few months to a few years, depending on various variables, including their age and whether they are in high school, college, or staying for commercial reasons.
As a potential household host, there are several things you should consider before committing to having a stranger living in your home.
The homestay may be young and naïve, but the host can also be naïve and may find that the costs inherent in hosting do not always allow for the amount of additional income they have planned.
This article lists a few things to consider to make the home experience enjoyable for you and your home.
1. Tenant or Guest?
Monetary transaction or friendly exchange
The first question you should ask yourself is.
Are you doing this for extra income, experience, or both? It makes a difference which answers you choose because it will determine your expectations during your stay.
If you are just looking to get some extra income, then you will probably address the costs, conveniences, and comforts as favorable as possible for yourself. If you are looking to host as another act of kindness and donation, then you can put the needs of the house before yours.
Chances are your reasons are somewhere in the middle. You want to exercise your goodwill to humanity and earn some money while doing it. Whatever reason you choose, the way you approach the arrangement affects the rest of the reasons I include here
2. Rules need to be established in advance
Prevent problems from happening
Ahh, rules. Without rules, there’s chaos. Well, not exactly in the case of homestays, but they can really help keep things respectful, and smooth running and serve to protect you and your guest. Rules are set up to safeguard the two players.
When interviewing the nursing home, either in person or with its legal guardian or your present parent, the rules need to be clearly communicated and agreed upon by both parties. If there is a language barrier, then you need someone to explain the rules for both.
Determining the consequences is as vital as setting the rules. Is there a “three blows off” policy for certain behaviors, such as smoking at home?
Zero tolerance for some behaviors, like coming home with drugs? If these are communicated to both the nursing home and your legal guardian and/or parent, then in case they are broken, you have more influence to remove them from your residence.
Conversely, if the house is aware of the rules, then they know the limits and are more likely to re-amplify them.
3. Rules are made to be broken
Whether you like it or not
No home experience is ideal. Any parameters that you may have configured are required to be tested for some time. Especially if you host a teenager.
What do you do assuming that the standards are broken? This returns to my past mark of the significance of conveying the standards all along. If you defined the rules, then you must also have defined the consequences.
Your degree of discipline may be light or strict, but I’ve found that a three-strike policy is good for certain broken rules, such as lying. Whereas a zero-tolerance eviction policy is applicable for things like drugs or drinking at home.
Whatever degree of rigor you choose, be sure to move on or more problems will surely follow.
4. Food costs a lot!
High food costs can negate much of the profit
Depending on the situation, you will usually be required to provide several meals a day. Breakfast can comprise a bowl of cereal or a hot breakfast of toast and eggs. Lunch can consist of a bowl of instant noodles, a granola bar, some fruit, or something harder, like lemon sandwiches, yogurt, vegetables, and so on.
Obviously, there is a big cost difference between these meals. Meal requirements need to be determined and a homestay fee is taken into account before being agreed upon by both parties.
Food concerns such as allergies may need to be met or a requirement for organic products may be stipulated at the beginning of the interview process.
These things need to be addressed because food costs can be cheap (2 meals a day, partly pasta and non-organic fruit) or expensive, (3 meals per day consisting of finer meats and organic products). Food costs can come back to bite you if you initially account for 30% of the fee going towards it and end up paying 40% for it.
Another factor to consider is the amount of time and sometimes difficulty in meeting certain meal requirements. Say, they require a certain brand of granola bar at their lunch, for example, and this brand is only available in a store that is half an hour’s drive away.
All things considered, this should be considered during shopping trips and requires a specific interest in time and perhaps greater expenses for this item. Gas costs coming and going from the extra visit to the market will also take a bite out of the income as well.
Two other significant elements in food costs are age and orientation. Who’s going to eat more, a male teenager, or a woman in her twenties? If any of you have a teenager in the house, I think you already know the answer.
5. Three square meals
Personalized meals or does everyone eat the same?
I have already addressed the cost of food and touched on the factors that affect it, but there is more to consider on this point. Specifically, needs taste and diet. Depending on which country your home comes from, likes, dislikes and dietary requirements may vary.
You may be happy with pasta and burgers every night, but your home is used to a more diverse menu. Inform them of the stay during the interview process what kind of meals you normally serve and ask them what they like to eat. It’s better to be combined with someone who shares the likes of their family than to have to make a separate meal for them every night.
Make it fun! Talk to your house about the food they love. What’s their favorite food? Can they teach you how to cook it? It can be great to try new foods and gives you the opportunity to learn more about your culture and develop a friendship in the process.
Some other factors affecting meals:
– Choosy or not choosy eater: You may find yourself modifying your domestic meals all the time because of a picky eater.
– Vegetarian or meat-eater: I meat-based diet usually costs more than a vegetarian diet.
– Newly immigrant or veteran: One can be more accustomed to the menu of your culture and therefore more accepting of your food.
6. Your heating bill will increase
Believe!
This is one that took us by surprise with our first house. Our spare room is in our basement and of course, basements are nicer than the rest of the house. We have base plate heating in the spare room which can be controlled in the room. Of course, we don’t want to keep the house in the cold and expect a certain amount of use.
But every time we knocked on the door of our house for one reason or another, we were greeted with a wall of heat coming out of the room as soon as the door opened. Our house had the heat most nights and days, whether they were home or not.
We covered this, but it continued to the point where we had to add a surcharge to your fee since our account jumped from about $200 every two months to $350 every two months. Something to look at and define in the rules as described here.
7. Cultural Sensitivity to Must
Show your guest the respect they deserve.
Each culture has its own unique set of traditions and etiquette rules. Discovering these things is a rewarding part of the home experience.
While you can host someone whose cultural values you are not familiar with, it is up to you to make an effort to learn more about these differences and respect them. Just because you and your family may think it’s okay to burp at the table doesn’t mean your home does (trust me).
I think the general rule is, that if you think you can offend them, then don’t do that. There may be cultural conflicts and differences of opinion, but it is important that you make an effort to understand and respect those differences.
If there is conflict, it is better to approach and soften than to boil and ultimately result in damage to the host/homestay relationship.
8. They have the right to privacy
It’s your house, but their room.
Respect is an important part of the hosting/home relationship. They are invited into your home and you request that they follow their rules, so you must also pay them the same respect in terms of their right to privacy.
If you were a real estate manager and rented an apartment you would respect the renters’ space. Homestays are no different.
What do I mean by respecting the space of homestays?
Although not necessary (unless mentioned during the interview process), it is a nice gesture to provide a lock and key to your room. This is especially important if there is more than one house in your home. You know you’re going, to be honest, but you can’t control another level of respect.
A lock and key help protect privacy and property with multiple stays in your home. You should, of course, keep a copy of the key for emergency purposes, but this gesture goes far.
If you need to enter the room for any reason, practice common courtesy. Always knock and wait for an ok before entering. And if you needed to enter their room for some reason while they weren’t home, please report them as another gesture of respect.
9. Do you have children in the house?
How your home will affect your children and vice versa
Children are common in residences. Due to the cost of raising children, a stay-at-home is a great helper of bologna /diapers. Ask yourself: how will having another person, man or woman, younger or older, living in your home affect your children? There are pros and cons to this matter.
A home can be a great way to introduce new cultures, food, and languages into the house. Just exposing your child to it can be beneficial to their growth, development, and sense of worldliness. Not to mention that they may also have a new friend to play with.
There are other factors to consider as well. Once you are investing a certain amount of time cooking, cleaning, and talking to the house, your time with your children can be reduced. You can counter this by including your children in your interactions with your home. Also, if your home is a teenager, they may not have the trial to supervise your child safely
This brings out the important fact that they are not your childminder. You didn’t decide to host them so you could have free babysitting so don’t expect it from them. If your children want to play independently with staying at home sometimes, then make sure that the house is okay with this and that it is not interfering with your study or personal time.
10. You are partially responsible for your safety
Legally and Morally
Teenage stays require a legal guardian to be staying in the country. The legal guardian takes care of things like the transfer of money between parents in the country of origin, legal issues, and often their schooling.
What they do not cover are issues of responsibility within your home and moral responsibilities in relation to your health and well-being.
First, let’s resolve the issue of legal liability. I don’t think it’s necessary to say that your home needs a safe place to live. That means a room that is safe, through a lock on the door and a lock on the window, if there is one.
If the room is on the ground floor, window bars may be requested to combat the fear of intruders. In case of fire, the house will need to be familiar with safe exits and where the fire extinguishers are located inside the house.
Safety also extends to health concerns. From food allergy awareness to ensure that a toy left on the stairs does not cause a dangerous fall.
Moral responsibilities are more of a gray area, so I’ll give you some examples to help illustrate. If you host a young girl and she plans to come home late, wouldn’t it be nice to offer to pick her up so she doesn’t go out late alone?
More seriously, if the housewife gets home drunk, they may have violated one of her rules and you’ll probably be upset. That said, if they are intoxicated to the point that you are concerned about their safety, then I suggest you make sure that they are taken care of, even if you may not want to get involved.
Often homes are young, naïve, and unfamiliar with the potential dangers of their community. I believe it is part of the home hosting experience to help provide guidance to ensure your safety not only as your guest but also as a human being.