Over the past few years, Portugal has become a proactive recruiter of international students (Sin, Antonowicz and Wiers-Jenssen 2019). Portuguese institutions have been the preferred choice of students from the former Portuguese colonies coming through agreements with the Portuguese government (França, Alves, and Padilla 2018). Consequently, in 2017-18 around two-thirds of international students came from Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea Bissau and East Timor (DGEEC 2018). Despite the growth of international student migration and the active recruitment of international students by host countries, there are only a handful of studies that investigated institutional strategies for integrating international students, or their experiences, in the host country (see for example Mosneaga and Agergaard 2012; Urbanovic, Wilkins, and Huisman 2014; Nada and Araújo 2018a; O'Connor 2018). Also in Portugal, research on this topic is rather scarce, and existing studies mainly focused on students' perceptions (Campos and Lima 2012; Alves 2013; Nada and Araújo 2018a, 2018b). This paper, while also reporting on student experiences, adds the institutional perspective of top and middle managers. It aims to investigate institutional strategies for the integration of international students and student experiences in this regard. The research questions to answer are: What strategies do institutions employ to integrate international students, if any, and are these effective? Do international students feel integrated socially and academically in the institution? What are the reasons for their perceptions? This will allow inferring opportunities and challenges of integration policies and experiences, and formulating some possible ways forward to improve international students' experience.