Learning-oriented tours becoming ever more popular
The 21st Educational Travel Conference was held last week in Maryland, USA.
The first such meeting attracted only 15-20 institutions looking to organize
educational trips. Last year there were 140, and this year more than 200 were
expected to attend. Some 500 delegates were set to attend the meeting on
development, operation and marketing of group educational and special interest
travel worldwide.
The growth in this North American conference reflects an increasing market in
learning-oriented travel. For universities, alumni travel programs offer a
method of fundraising and a means of tightening bonds with their alumni and
encouraging future donations, says USA Today. For travel companies, extra
features like lectures from scholars help sign up customers for group travel,
and to compete with the "do it yourself" trend of organizing
individual travel over the internet.
Upmarket travel firm 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.
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.
Travel programs are still a growth area for universities in the USA. Karen
Anthony, director of alumni travel at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, for
the past 23 years, said it's only been in more recent years that schools use the
trips to showcase the expertise of their faculty. Now, about half of the trips
sponsored by Notre Dame have faculty who come along and give talks, she said.
Smith and Jenner (1997) presented an analysis of the educational travel
segment, highlighting three main trends: the rapid growth in the world student
population, leading to a healthy expansion in the standard educational trip; the
mature market for 'top up' qualifications and new skills; and a new
leisure-education hybrid, for example, the Disney Institute, Florida, USA.
Language learning was identified as the biggest element in educational tourism,
making the UK a major destination for those wishing to learn English.
A wide range of tours can be classified as being in the broad area of
educational travel and tourism, ranging from short- to long-term trips. In the
UK, educational travel for school-children at one time meant a small market in
educational cruises in the Mediterranean. Now a much wider range of trips are
offered by many schools, and some schools now, for example, routinely take their
pupils on visits to World War One sites in France and Belgium to see
reconstructions of trenches from the war. Field courses and study tours are a
component of many school and university courses, and in England there is a
lucrative business in running "Summer Schools" for school children and
others from European countries who come to learn English while seeing something
of the country.
But educational tourism is not just for the young, with people of all ages
spending their vacations on art tours, specialist photographic tours, exploring
regional cuisines, learning about wine of a country or region, or learning new
skills. Holdnak and Holland (1996) describe this trend with reference to the
USA, and the opening of the Disney Institute and offerings by providers such as
the Mohunk Mountain House in New York, which has been in operation since the
1870s.
The growing population of affluent 'baby boomers', and longer retirements of
people still mentally and physically active enough to pursue new interests,
suggests that the educational tourism in all its various guises may still have
considerable potential for growth. As tour operators look for ways of enticing
customers to sign up for group tours rather than independent travel, educational
tourism may be one 'value added' way to do it.
External link
Educational Travel Community