As provinces start entering the revitalization stage, our hosts are getting ready to host international students coming into Canada. Let's try getting some of the frequently asked questions answered.

Let's make clear one thing first: international students with a valid study permit issued before March 18 have never been restricted to enter Canada. The travel ban applies to non-essential travellers, including new international students entering Canada for their study. 

There certainly are. Many universities and colleges have started planning to give some, if not all, courses over the internet for the fall semester in 2020. As an international student, one does not have to be physically present in Canada to complete the courses. We expect to see some students staying in their own country in the fall semester. It's certainly not convenient because of the time difference, but it is possible.

Airline industry is struggling in this period due to lack of demand, and increased health and safety measures that result in steep increase of operating costs. As a result, many international routes are cancelled. International students may find it difficult to obtain a flight back to Canada.

Despite the above difficulties, we still see students planning to enter Canada for the fall semester. Some of them have already begun looking for homestays on homadorma. As a registered homadorma host, you may find students near you at Find Students. We have removed the 5 message restriction for homestays without the staff interview badge temporarily to encourage our hosts to communicate with students on homadorma.

14-day mandatory quarantine is applicable to all travellers coming into Canada, including international students. The students need to submit quarantine plan at the port of entry. The official document could be found below.

We do not impose specific policy on top of the policy already put in place by the government. Our suggestion is to check federal, provincial and municipal health and safety suggestion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

You may go through the list of requirements by the government to see if your homestay meets those requirements.

Make sure to communicate with the students interested in your homestay about the quarantine requirements. Explain to students that your place does not meet the requirement, and students maybe better off booking an alternative accommodation which meets the quarantine requirements.

If the student is not able to find an adequate facility to self-quarantine,  the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada will designate a facility for students to self-quarantine for 14 days. For more information, please check
​https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/2019-novel-coronavirus-infection/latest-travel-health-advice.html#_Travellers_without_symptoms 

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If you have any further question, please feel free to leave a question in the comment section below. We will try our best to help with your questions.

Due to the current situation of COVID-19, we have paused staff interview scheduling until further notice. It is now clear that hosts without staff interview badges are not able to get one, and are not able to remind students to check the homestay profile through the "promote my homestay" feature. We have now decided to make the "promote my homestay" feature available to all hosts with or without the staff interview badge. We expect to keep it this way till we resume the staff interview for hosts.

Here is what you need to do if you'd like to "promote my homestay" to a student interested. 

1. Visit Find Students page. You will need to log in with your homadorma account and password to access the page.
2. Find students you are interested to "promote my homestay" to, and click "Check Student Info"
3. In the page opened, click "Connect", and follow the instruction on the page.

We hope by making this feature available to all homadorma hosts temporarily, we could help you fill up your rooms quickly.

Thanks for your continued support.

Our Prime Minister announced​​ on March 16 that Canada will deny ​entry to people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents. That means homestay bookings made on homadorma.com are inevitably affected. Students that were scheduled to arrive in Canada in March or April can no longer move in to homestays as planned. Other students planning to arrive at a later date now face uncertainties. As a result, many of them have cancelled or will cancel the homestay booking.

We'd like to invite these students back to homadorma for another homestay booking when Canada lifts the border ban without violating the terms in the contract or termination policy. So here are the initiatives that we'd like to implement to address the COVID-19 impact.

We posted our first COVID-19 blog on February 24, 2020, when there were only as few as 11 active cases in Canada. During the past week, I'm happy to see that many businesses in Canada made their very first announcement about COVID-19 in Canada, after the number of Canadian active cases reached 3 digits. It's better late than never.

In this blog post, I'd like to discuss what has changed since our last blog post, and how Homadorma hosts should respond to prepare for the virus spread.