Promise everything, deliver nothing

I went with Travelbud to teach in South Korea with my fiancée. As we were going out there as a couple, we wanted to be in the same area (walking distance to each others schools). In the initial calls we were told it would be easy to get us into the same school, and worst case scenario it would be two different schools in the same area very close by. After we'd been promised this, we were passed along to another organisation, one of TravelBud's in-country partner. TravelBud's in-country partner didn't seem completely aware of what we'd agreed to with Travelbud, so we were a little concerned that the two organizations weren't working as closely together as we would have liked. Still, we kept going with the process. We were passed along to another organization later down the line, who were the "team on the ground" in South Korea, and a nightmare to deal with. We eventually got our placements in two different districts of a large city, which meant we were a 25 min subway journey away from each other, a far greater distance than we had agreed to in the beginning. On top of this, my contract was 14:00-22:00 and my fiancees was 09:00-18:00, meaning we could only really see each other at weekends. Having both left our jobs in the UK, and only a few weeks left before we were supposed to fly to Korea, we thought this was our best option. We'd previously turned down an interview at a notoriously corrupt hagwon which seemingly caused huge concern with TravelBud's in-country partners, despite being promised we'd have plenty of options to choose from.

Once contracts were finalized, TravelBud's in-country partners were incredibly rude and unaccommodating, demanding that my fiancee and I fly out to Korea a week apart, despite our contracts starting on the same day. After a week at her new job, my fiancee was moved to another campus, which was a 50 minute bus journey away from me, which really defeated the purpose of moving to Korea together and going through what we thought was a supportive organisation. We asked Travelbud and TravelBud's in-country partner for help negotiating with my fiancees school as we didn't want to be even further apart. They did absolutely nothing to help, presumably their duty of care ends the moment they get paid.

Travelbud also claims to only use vetted schools. A friend of hours was placed in a school who coincidentally another friend of ours worked in a few years ago after being placed there by Travelbud. This friend complained to Travelbud who ensured her that they wouldn't be working with the school anymore. Low and behold, more empty promises. My placement hadn't had a foreign teacher from a recruiter for at least the past 2 years, and considering how often management changes in hagwons, I'm not sure how this can be considered "vetted". Our contact at Travelbud even told us that the first 3 months would be awful, which turned out to be the only truthful thing we heard from the organisation.

Just know that if you sign up through TB or TravelBud's in-country partners, you're getting passed around to recruiters and no one really has a duty of care. They'll promise as much as they can over skype calls, and when it comes down to actually supporting you in Korea, you'll get nothing.