History of Origins

The website Auslandssemester-Bali.de was founded by Chris, a former student after his exchange program on Bali ended. During that time, he was doing an internship in Singapore and afterwards the project was successfully realized together with the local partner Amalia.

Before the Exchange Program...

It was lunch break at the technical college in Heilbronn at the campus Künzelsau. I was sitting in the canteen for lunch right before the last lectures of the day were about to begin. Next to my table, two girls were talking pretty euphorically and it was almost impossible not to overhear the conversation. One of them apparently just came back from her exchange program in Bali and she was telling her friend how things are going over there. I can’t remember the exact words she used but the grin all over her face, the euphoria and the stories about the beach, the palm trees and an affordable life in a villa with its own housekeepers made it really hard for me to pay attention to the following afternoon lectures. As the lectures were over, I hopped onto my bike and thought the whole way home what I would be typing into the Google search bar first. As soon as I got home, I opened my laptop and simply typed Bali into the Google image search. The first 20 pictures already had me convinced, so I immediately started looking for the registration form. At this time, I didn’t even know where Bali was located and that it belongs to Indonesia. I remember overhearing in the conversation that you can apply for the university in Bali through the University of Dortmund. After a quick search, I found the IBSN-program that offers studying a semester abroad in Bali. In the following 20 minutes, I was busy filling out that form and searching for the needed documents. I sent my application the same day. Two weeks later the highly pleasing confirmation for my semester at the Udayana University on Bali arrived. The following months were filled with anticipation of the upcoming semester. Here you can find the link to the video I was watching day and night: Summer Jam

How Everything Began

After my magnificent time during the semester abroad on Bali had ended, I was searching for a way to get back into paradise. The chances of getting an internship there were more than bad due to the legal regulations of the Immigration Office for the approval of foreign trainees in Indonesia. During my stay on Bali, I twice visited Singapore though and was fascinated by the modern and clean city. That’s why I decided to apply for an internship there. 2-3 weeks and two Skype calls later I had a firm commitment. So Singapore it was. My task was to optimised websites for search engines, especially for Google. My boss told me I should check why Wikipedia is the number one search result for everything as long as there is an article about it. Therefore, I suggested using the same CMS (Content Management System) as Wikipedia for the experiment. 

The system was called Mediawiki and was free to download. I had free choice for the topics of this website. I was only supposed to check the ranking of the key words over time. So I decided to write about students on Bali since it was quite difficult for students to find relevant, good and current information about Bali online that time. In December 2010, the domain www.auslandssemester-bali.de was founded and I started writing useful and helpful articles, which helped future students prepare for the life on Bali and make everything easier. Shortly after I noticed, that 90% of the incoming email inquiries referred to accommodations on Bali. So I made contact with my former fellow students on Bali and asked them about the name, location, furnishing, price and pictures of the accommodations they stayed in on Bali. I put this information together including the contact info of the owner/manager online so that people could book their accommodation early to avoid it being fully booked when arriving. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough since many students had problems contacting the Indonesian managers and housekeepers via email as well as being concerned about transferring a bigger amount of money for the reservation deposit of the accommodation to an Indonesian bank account to someone they did not know. I tried to help with these problems as well and contacted my Indonesian friend Amalia in hopes that she could help the German students with the deposit since she was on-site. Soon the managing of the inquiries and deposits got very time consuming and it was not possible to do everything incidentally. Therefore, we decided to establish a company together and to market the rentals as a professional business model. AB was the first website that exclusively offered rentals for students on Bali.

Further Development

To this day, there are very few agencies that specialize in affordable monthly rentals on Bali. Due to constant demand of our fist tenants, we complemented the website with a few extra services. Especially transportation, particularly speedboat-tickets to Gili Islands as well as water sports activities and trekking are still very popular. Therefore, we are very proud of offering a peak price for these services.

Mission and Vision

Mission: Auslandssemester-Bali.de’s enterprise mission is to make the price setting of accommodations and activities more transparent and comparable.


Vision: All visitors of the resort island Bali should be able to book all activities and accommodations fast, simple and affordable.

Social Commitment

With increasing success, we increasingly take responsibility for our environment. With environment we are not only referring to trying to work as environmentally friendly as possible, but also paying attention to all of our business clients being paid and treated fairly. Moreover, we make sure that the free (stray) dogs and cats in our surroundings are well off. 

We take care of vaccinations, spaying/neutering and food. Most of the times in cooperation with BAWA and BARC. Therefore, we regularly donate to one of these organizations. For every single review on one of our websites we donate 1 euro to BAWA or BARC. Our goal is to collect as many reviews as possible. Every month we donate fixed amounts of money to a chosen organization. We would appreciate you supporting one of the NGO’s as well!