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Learning-oriented tours so popular they are now ‘mainstream’
Universities and museums have organized learning-oriented trips in the past, but the trend has been booming in recent years and is now becoming part of the mainstream business of the travel industry, experts say.
For universities, alumni travel programs offer another method of fundraising and a means of tightening bonds with their alumni and encouraging future donations, said USA Today.
For travel companies, extra features like lectures from scholars help sign up customers for group travel, especially sophisticated baby boomers and people who have ever more options for booking discounted flights and hotels online.
”Boutique tour operators have been rolling out more educational trips to exotic lands, and large well-heeled operators like Abercrombie & Kent say they have seen a surge in interest in that kind of travel,” the newspaper said.
Abercrombie & Kent runs educational tours for Harvard and other universities, but has also seen growth in non-university sponsored tours that it markets directly to the public. It recently announced a series of educational trips done in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy.
The trips aren’t necessarily for those on a budget: Abercrombie’s 13-day trip to Brazil with The Nature Conservancy costs $7,840, and an 11-day trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos costs $9,350.
Janet Moore, whose Long Beach, Calif.-based travel company Distant Horizons organized a Jordan trip and others to Iran and Afghanistan, reported “enormous growth” in interest in educational travel over the past five years.
When the Educational Travel Conference started 18 years ago, only 15 to 20 institutions came to arrange educational trips. Last year there were 140 and more than 200 are coming to this year’s meeting.
”This is a booming area,” Ms Moore said. Many of her clients are 55-plus, right at the cusp of the baby boomer generation that is heading into retirement.
A survey of U.S. travelers taken last year by the Travel Industry Association found that 56% said they were interested in taking an educational trip and 22% said they were more interested now compared with five years ago.
Report by David Wilkening
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