Five Tips to Help You Choose a Student Travel Provider

When organizing travel there are many options for providers with varying degrees of quality. Here are five tips to help you choose a travel provider for your students and staff.

1. Put your partner through a vetting process to assess their safety, sustainability practices and mission alignment
2. Watch how they treat their staff
3. . There's no better test of a company's culture than how well they take care of their workers. Are they abiding by all local labor laws? Does the guiding staff look genuinely happy with their employer? The guiding staff is by far the most important part of any trip, and how your partner organization treats them has a direct correlation with the satisfaction of your students and staff with the trip.
4. Hire local
5. . Key to ensuring a positive impact of travel is not just extracting from the local culture but also contributing to it. How we consume in-country has a huge economic impact on the places we visit. In order to maximize that impact we should always opt to work with locally owned and operated businesses. After all, who do our clients love interacting with the most? The locals of course.
6. What you would do on your own, or with your family, may not be appropriate to do with students. When chaperoning groups abroad we are "in place of parents", which is a huge responsibility. Think about the risk appetite of the parents of your students when determining the activities on your schedule.
7. Slow down
8. . Over decades of experience leading student travel programs we find that educators and travelers tend to try to pack too much in. Leaving time for reflection and quiet moments is extremely important.

See what student service projects look like on the ground: how our students create community impact in the Dominican Republic.