lelky
You have the option of applying directly to the school you want to go to as an international student, or you can apply to a program that goes to that school (e.g. AIFS, Australearn, IFSA-Butler -- if you google them you can see what they're all about), and the program will handle everything for you. Flights, payments, application to the school, and they have cultural events and weekend trips included as well. It's also great because you meet other people in your program at the very beginning, and you start to establish a friend-base.

But what made me mention it was the fact that my program was supposed to do a two-day stopover in Sydney on the way home, but our flight to Sydney got cancelled due to the ash cloud from the Chilean volcano (it's been hovering over Australia/NZ basically ever since it blew and it's been screwing up flights for almost the whole month). Our program took care of all the arrangements and rebooking that had to happen... and then when our new flight for the following day also got cancelled, they took care of that too, as well as giving us each 50 extra dollars for food while we were there. We managed to get the third flight out, and we only had two hours in the Sydney airport before our flight to L.A., instead of two days, so we're being refunded for the time we didn't spend there. At the time, just being stranded in NZ, not knowing when we were going to be able to leave, and almost being kicked out of our housing (because new people for the next semester started arriving the same day we left, so we wouldn't have been able to stay there any longer) was really stressful, and I was extremely happy that my program was the one dealing with all the rebooking and rescheduling and financial nonsense, and not me. Just thought I'd let you know since you said you were thinking about going abroad :)