How to take your students on a foreign study tour: the broad brushstrokes
The Bulletin (Issue 51)
So, you know why you might want to take your students on a study tour of a foreign, English-speaking country, but now there’s just the small matter of how. Let me approach this like an artist would with a painting: start with the broad brushstrokes before worrying about the details (there are an ever-growing number of details you have to attend to, but don’t let them swamp you).
Get the main bits right and you can slot the details in later. Once you start getting some interest in a study tour from your students, there are four main issues, probably best resolved in the following order:
Flights. Everything is up in the air, so to speak, until you start nailing down some dates, which is most cost effective to do around 10 months ahead of when you intend to fly. The single biggest and least flexible dates are the flights, so might as well start with those. That is, once you’ve decided what dates are most plausible for your students, you and your budget. Your mileage will vary of course, but for us, key factors were we wanted to offer the tour primarily to junior-high-school-age kids and that meant we had to take into account term times, after-school-club schedules, and the price and availability of flights during school holidays. We figured the spring school holidays offered the best of the variables important to us: students were between school years, therefore had few or no school club commitments, the airline flights were relatively cheap (compared to summer or winter holidays), and kids in England were still in school when we would arrive, so: a) there was a chance we could visit a local school, b) the accommodation supply would be more plentiful, not taken up by local families on holiday themselves. Of course, all of this was only possible because we’d planned to have a three-week break over March/April in our annual eikaiwa schedule just in case we decided to go ahead with a tour.
Accommodation. After flights, accommodation is the biggest expense and hassle. Hotels and B&Bs didn’t fit the bill for us because they typically don’t allow youngsters with no adults in rooms, and what do you do with kids in a hotel in the evening? We found rental properties on Airbnb worked out the best for us — you can find something for most group sizes and budgets. The flexibility of being able to cook for yourself was the clincher. But be warned: just because you’ve booked (and paid for) a place on Airbnb doesn’t stop the host from cancelling on you late in the day. This has happened to us twice, but in both cases we were able to find acceptable (in one case much better), alternative places within a day or two online and got our money back without any problems. But it’s far from stress-free when you think everything is all sorted and suddenly you find you are arriving in Heathrow in a fortnight with a dozen kids and no place to stay!
Transport within the country. My wife and I have driven kids around in two minivans, or used public transport exclusively on other tours. My personal preference is to stay somewhere where you can use a variety of public transport (which in England means London); driving a bunch of kids around yourself is a young person’s game, but you do you, of course.
Fees. There are so many moving parts with a tour abroad, it’s hard to give a definitive figure to charge, but you need to slap a final price per customer on the trip as soon as possible in order to get paid before you start paying out large sums of money for tickets and such, so here are a few factors to consider. You can get a complete idea of the price of the flights in yen early on, and you can lock in how much accommodation will cost you in yen well before you go. You also can factor in likely transportation costs and work out a rough figure to pay for food, but both these costs are subject to big fluctuations depending on inflation and even more by big changes in the foreign exchange rates. We’d calculated our costs based on £1 being worth ¥185, a generous assumption a year before travel, but when we actually landed in Britain, we were lucky to buy £1 for ¥210 each, and luckier still to find meals out for under £15 per person. A few rules of thumb to help you:
Whatever the exchange rate you use to calculate costs, add 10 yen per pound or dollar to allow for currency volatility
Factor in the costs of paying all expenses for two teachers. One is not enough, especially with children. What if there was a problem at the border and some kid had to return to Japan? How could you do that with only one supervisor?
Work out the figures so that you can still turn a profit should two students have to cancel. That’s a minimum necessary margin of safety, you don’t want to have to cancel a whole trip because it doesn’t turn a profit or costs you money in the event of one sickness or someone’s change of heart.
Decide on accommodation that is slightly larger than you need. The more people you can take, the less risky it is that you’ll lose money. Sure, fewer people means you can cut costs on accommodation and food, but once you have a minimum viable number — say eight students (to cover the costs of two supervisors and the risk of two students cancelling) — every additional student you can squeeze in generates significantly more profit because the fixed cost of accommodation and flights has been covered already. In other words, once you hit your viable number of students, every additional student pays the same but only costs you additional food.
If the per-person fee you need to charge seems way too high to charge to your students, you can cut costs by not flying direct, and cutting costs when you get to the destination by eating more meals in. Make all breakfasts buffet style, make it a routine to prepare sandwich lunches and make pasta your go-to-dinner of choice. Travel by bus, not the more expensive underground or train wherever possible. And there are a large number of things you can do for free, but are still valuable — for example, in the UK museums are free, it doesn’t cost anything to walk around Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Thames and the bridge to the Houses of Parliament. You can book other desirable but expensive things, such as a West End show, online far in advance so at least the cost has been absorbed before you get there.
But now I’m getting into the details, and there are plenty more of them to get through that are worthy of another post. Until next week…
What do you think? Would you consider a tour of the UK, the US or another country? How much would you charge to make it worth your while? What age group would you target? What other details would you need to consider before leading a tour? Leave a comment, I and your fellow Freetalkers would love to know your thoughts,
Patrick