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Emy de Lema, EMY, Spain

Spanish agency EMY in San Sebastian has just celebrated its 30th birthday. We caught up with director and founder Emy de Lema to hear how the industry has changed in three decades and what’s been her secret to business success.

The PIE: What made you want to start an agency specialising in studying abroad?

The main student expectation right now and common to every single one of them is: wifi

EdL: It was actually by pure chance. My father’s best friend had an agency in the South of Spain and I remember him talking about his job, about his students and even though I was studying law, that field was so attractive to me that I knew I would eventually end up opening my own agency… and I did!

The PIE: What was the industry like in the early days?

EdL: Things were so very different! We would send the students dossiers to the different programmes by messenger, sometimes the schools dictated us the host family information on the phone, all the records were in notebooks. Our closest airport is Bilbao but there were no international flights from there at the beginning, so we had to take our students to Madrid airport which was a six hour ride by bus. So for days we were back and forth to Madrid and of course the drivers became such good friends.

“At the beginning, we had to take our students to Madrid airport which was a six hour ride by bus”

The PIE: How has the industry evolved – and how are student expectations changing?

EdL: The industry is totally different now– from working with just a phone and a fax in the old days to working with cell phones, internet, social media. It is both better on the one side since you have access to all aspects of a programme immediately while on the other side sometimes information travelling way too fast and not necessarily too accurately can be quite stressful.

The main student expectation right now and common to every single one of them is: wifi!

I really do not know how we survived and how parents survived without having immediate access to their children abroad. It is very interesting to see how technology has changed and is changing the world and the way we work.

The PIE: How do you attract students to use your agency and do you think you have lost any business to direct bookings in recent years?

EdL: We attract students to our agency because we have the best “marketing director”… word of mouth! We have built a very strong reputation along the years by working hard and doing things right. Business is business, but we work with people and that has to come first always. We might have lost some individuals due to direct bookings but juniors still prefer to go with a serious agency in a group and with a local group leader.

The PIE: What about the school partners you work with – do you find that programmes and products are evolving in line with client expectation?

“Business is business, but we work with people and that has to come first always”

EdL: We pride ourselves in choosing our partners extremely carefully. We do not like working with hundreds of partners; we prefer quality to quantity. We have partners with whom we have been working for even decades, and we know each other very well. So we evolve together to meet our clients’ needs and expectations for everybody’s best.

We visit our partners most years so that we get to know not only the owners but all the employees as well in order to work better during the year and also invite them to come to San Sebastian in June the day of the orientation with parents and students. That’s so in return they meet all the EMY staff and the group leaders that will be with their groups in the summer.

We would consider most of our partners both business partners and personal friends due to all the personal contact we have not only in workshops or by email during the year.

The PIE: Do you try and encourage returning students to engage with your customers who are yet to depart overseas?

“Many of our group leaders are former students…they are wonderful ambassadors”

EdL: Many of our group leaders are former students and a very good number of them go back as EMY group leaders year after year. We make sure parents can meet them before the group departures at the orientation prior to the trip… they are wonderful ambassadors!

The PIE: Do most of your clients learn a language on top of their learning at school?

EdL: Absolutely, I dare say most of them go to language academies on top of their classes at school.

The PIE: How has the economical turmoil in Spain impacted on student expectations of studying and perhaps working abroad?

EdL: Our Agency is based in the Basque County and the economical crisis has not hit this area like the rest of Spain at all. Actually, since the crisis started our numbers have increased. It is also an area where education comes first and parents know the importance of their children learning languages to guarantee them a good professional future.

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