Livit is dedicated and very professional about an immersive Spanish experience. Prior to booking,…read morethey give you useful information, no "pie-in-the-sky" hot air. After you book, and before you get there, they follow through with helpful tips for getting around Puebla, including things to do. They also give you a written and oral pre-arrival Spanish assessment, which turned out to be pretty spot-on for me (and, from what I saw, for the vast majority of students).
From day one, you notice their professionalism in business administration and customer service. They set you up with small-group classes (mornings, 5x/week) and with one-on-one city guides (afternoons, 3x/week); they serve you lunch (usually outside, in their delightful garden) with attention to your dietary needs (5x/week, with 3x/week being home-cooked); and they have excursions to intriguing places lined up every Thursday afternoon.
The teachers are qualified and personable, the topics covered in class are interesting and engaging overall, and the instruction is solid. In combination with the one-on-one guidance in the afternoons and the weekly excursions with guided tours in easy-enough Spanish, not to mention a ton of things to do, see, and explore in Puebla, you do get a rich and varied immersion.
Two thirds of my small-group experience were bogged down by that one student who would often monopolize the conversation and keep going down some rabbit hole, taking away from everyone else's speaking time. That could have used some classroom management from the teacher. Also, there were a couple of occasions when the teacher spent a lot of time writing up charts on the board that could have been handouts. That halted the conversation, and made it feel a little like just the kind of "school" that Livit says it avoids.
That experience almost cost Livit one star in this review, but the last third saved it (if barely). Maru was a great teacher; she was animated and engaging, kept the class moving along, and did a good job keeping "that" student in check. Therefore, I'll say four stars for the small-group instruction, and still five stars total, because everything else went as well as it could possibly have!
Livit really knows business management and customer service. They choose good "adjunct" people to be one-on-one afternoon guides. You get a different guide every week. Mine were all very friendly, and willing to engage with whatever tourist attraction or activity I felt like. And the Puebla area has so much of that to offer! I was able to make the most of my time, thanks in no small part to the effective afternoon guides Livit works with. I had turned to Livit for the kind of guided immersive experience that would work for me as a Spanish learner who had never been to Mexico before. And in the end, it came out a success!
