Home and surroundings

What will my room look like? How do I get to school? Can I visit the city in my free time? The neighbourhood overview helps an au pair picture life with your family before arriving.

Create your overview

Open Prepare together and choose Home and surroundings only under What would you like to share? You can start without creating a full sample week. To include the overview in a complete introduction, choose Our week and expectations and add the section in Write.

• Search for your address or town and select the correct result. Address search covers the Netherlands through PDOK.
• Describe the house, room and neighbourhood.
• Explain which bike is available and whether you will practise together.
• Add up to four photos, for example of the room or neighbourhood.
• Add destinations such as a school, childcare, station, bus stop, supermarket, language class or city.

Choose walking, cycling or public transport for each destination. Enter travel time and distance yourself after checking the route. They are displayed as a family estimate. Opairly does not calculate these values automatically.

The map loads when the reader clicks View on OpenStreetMap. View route opens Google Maps with the destination and, if you share it, your home as the starting point. You can also save a route from Google Maps, NS or 9292.

The last connection home

For a public transport destination, you can record a checked last journey home. Look it up in the planner for a specific date first. Enter the departure time from that destination, the date you checked it, the source link and any transfers.

A departure after midnight belongs to the following calendar date. A checked time only appears for that exact departure date. Other dates show that no last journey has been recorded.

There is no live public transport timetable integration. The reader must check the current connection before leaving, including transfers. The date selected in Opairly does not automatically carry over to Google Maps or the general 9292 link; set the date and time there too.

For candidates and your current au pair

Select Include home and surroundings in the package to share this section. This includes the selected address and photos. Review the candidate text, translation and preview before publishing. See Getting to know each other before arrival.

A candidate sees only the version attached to their personal link. Draft changes do not appear automatically. Revoking the link prevents it from loading new photo files. As with other shared information, a recipient may already have saved a copy.

For your current au pair, separately choose a published version in Share and click Show this version in the dashboard. Your au pair can find it under Home & surroundings and from the welcome screen before arrival. A new candidate package does not automatically replace this overview. You can remove it from the dashboard too.

Even if your subscription has ended, Manage shared access on the subscription screen lets you hide the neighbourhood overview and revoke candidate links.

Translation and downloads

Descriptions and photo captions can be translated and reviewed. Addresses, map coordinates, distances, transport choices and checked times stay the same as the source.

The package PDF and Excel exports include the selected address, descriptions, route links and dated estimates. View photos in the shared package.