Anyone done a private foreign exchange?

[Gymbob]

DD1's Spanish exchange fell through due to there not being enough interest at school. She was so disappointed I have been looking into the idea of her doing a private exchange with another family who have a child we could host too. There seems to be quite a few websites with kids looking for host families....all the families look so 'normal', in fact much more normal than ours!

Please tell me what you know.....

[Needmoresleep]

We organised an exchange with a French family we met on holiday. The two girls had been hanging out together because they played the same sport. It helped because they were each able to train with each other's clubs, and indeed DD went on to do a couple of half term training camps with the French club and ended up competing for them. (Picking up a remarkable ch'ti accent in the process.)

Ditto DD met a few French girls (with virtually no English) on a commercially organised sports training camp held at an English boarding school. Perhaps a good alternative to a family exchange as the girls were in a controlled environment and forced to speak English, as this is what the peer group were been speaking. (This is important. The school organised German family exchanges were pretty useless because both host families spoke perfect English. Upper middle class French and Spanish families will be equally fluent.) Residential summer camps, which could be expected to accept an occasional English child, are quite common in France. I don't know about Spain.

[NotCitrus]

My German teacher organised for my friend to stay with her sister's neighbour in Germany, as an exchange, and I then stayed with a friend of them, paying to do so as my parents refused to host.
Worked very well - the girl was a bit wet but her mother talked at me constantly for the fortnight, and we went to their school for a week too.
Two years later I stayed with the other family and had a mostly great time, and she stayed with me.