NTA Student Trip Planner 2012-2013 : Page 8

Tour Operator Q&A Working with a Tour Operator vs. Doing It Yourself NTA members offer experience, customization in student travel Are you looking for a tour expert who understands your needs and challenges as a student trip planner? An NTA tour operator is one phone call away. Many of these knowledgeable travel industry veterans are former educators who use their past experience to make the planning process easy for you. NTA tour operators have access to a diverse network of partners— in North America and around the world—who specialize in creating unforgettable moments for student travelers. Marie-Rose Lohier and Helen Medler took a few minutes to discuss their roles as tour professionals and how student travel planners can benefit from working with them. Academic Travel Abroad has been organizing student travel and study-abroad programs since 1950. The company’s staff speaks 15 lan-guages collectively, and members have lived in and traveled to more than 40 coun-tries. Marie-Rose Lohier is sales director for the Washington, D.C.-based tour operator. Born in California but raised in France, she’s been with ATA for 11 years. NTA: Why partner with Academic Travel Czech it out: Students learn about the history of Prague’s Old Town Square during the Czech Art and Architecture: From the Middle Ages to the 21st Century class offered by CET Academic Programs, a division of Academic Travel Abroad. and I know nobody likes to talk about challenges or situations that may come up and may require emergency back-up, but the advantage of traveling with a tour operator who is licensed, who is insured, and again, who has contacts around the world, is that if there’s a problem, we have connections to make sure the students are safe and that, whatever the emergency may be, you’re not left hanging on your own. Also, because student travel is only a portion of what we do, we have more negotia-tion power [on price]. NTA: What are some of your most to France to see the Eiffel Tower, we want to take them behind the scenes and allow them to connect with people. We have a long history of working with students and understand the needs of students and their education. Because of the many con-nections we have throughout the world, we’re able to match a professor’s require-ments and needs for a program with what can actually be done in a unique way. We don’t cookie-cutter anything. Our goal is to remove the headache from the experience for the professor so that they can focus on doing what they do best, which is teach. NTA: Why shouldn’t educators just do it themselves? Lohier: We just have many more resources and relationships. We make it a lot simpler than if they were trying to do it on their own. The other thing, popular student-travel destinations? Lohier: We’ve seen a rise in student travel to China in the last couple of years. We’ve done everything from a biology group studying in Australia to Abroad when traveling overseas? Lohier: ATA is unique in the travel indus-try in that it’s been around for more than 60 years. We just don’t want to take people 8 nta trip planner CET ACADEMIC PROGRAMS/ACADEMIC TRAVEL ABROAD

Tour Operator Q&A

Working with a Tour Operator vs. Doing It Yourself NTA members offer experience, customization in student travel Are you looking for a tour expert who understands your needs and challenges as a student trip planner? An NTA tour operator is one phone call away. Many of these knowledgeable travel industry veterans are former educators who use their past experience to make the planning process easy for you. NTA tour operators have access to a diverse network of partners— in North America and around the world—who specialize in creating unforgettable moments for student travelers. Marie-Rose Lohier and Helen Medler took a few minutes to discuss their roles as tour professionals and how student travel planners can benefit from working with them. Academic Travel Abroad has been organizing student travel and study-abroad programs since 1950. The company’s staff speaks 15 languages collectively, and members have lived in and traveled to more than 40 countries. Marie-Rose Lohier is sales director for the Washington, D.C.-based tour operator. Born in California but raised in France, she’s been with ATA for 11 years. NTA: Why partner with Academic Travel Abroad when traveling overseas? Lohier: ATA is unique in the travel industry in that it’s been around for more than 60 years. We just don’t want to take people to France to see the Eiffel Tower, we want to take them behind the scenes and allow them to connect with people. We have a long history of working with students and understand the needs of students and their education. Because of the many connections we have throughout the world, we’re able to match a professor’s requirements and needs for a program with what can actually be done in a unique way. We don’t cookie-cutter anything. Our goal is to remove the headache from the experience for the professor so that they can focus on doing what they do best, which is teach. NTA: Why shouldn’t educators just do it themselves? Lohier: We just have many more resources and relationships. We make it a lot simpler than if they were trying to do it on their own. The other thing, and I know nobody likes to talk about challenges or situations that may come up and may require emergency backup, but the advantage of traveling with a tour operator who is licensed, who is insured, and again, who has contacts around the world, is that if there’s a problem, we have connections to make sure the students are safe and that, whatever the emergency may be, you’re not left hanging on your own. Also, because student travel is only a portion of what we do, we have more negotiation power [on price]. NTA: What are some of your most popular student-travel destinations? Lohier: We’ve seen a rise in student travel to China in the last couple of years. We’ve done everything from a biology group studying in Australia to students following World War II from England to Germany. They were able to talk with people who witnessed the landings on the beaches of Normandy (France) and all kinds of different things. There’s lots of talk of Cuba right now; we are a licensed travel service provider, and we’ve taken student groups to Cuba the last couple of years. NTA: In what ways do your travelers experience local culture? Lohier: What we’ve found to be meaningful on a pretty consistent basis is interaction with the local students. We pair our students with some local students, and they’ll go on a scavenger hunt through town or they’ll go and spend some hours at a local community center talking with holocaust survivors in Prague, which is extremely powerful. We make sure that all of our [student travelers] have the ability to spend time with local students; showing Americans around their town and what it’s like to be a student in their part of the world today. The special, unique highlights come through people-to-people connections and conversations. A native of Bellingham, Massachusetts, Helen Medler entered the travel industry out of college in 1973 as a tour manager for a small motor-coach company. She purchased Salem-based Hawthorne Tours in October 1993 and serves as its president. Hawthorne has five employees and specializes in tours to America’s Northeast region. NTA: Who are your travelers and where are they going? Medler: We do mostly eighth graders and juniors and seniors in high school. They drive our business; it’s about 80 percent of what we do. We sit in that history corridor, and we’re so fortunate that we have so much history and so much to talk about so close by. Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Gettysburg—all of those destinations are big for us. We also do student tours in Texas, California, Washington state, Florida, Savannah and Charleston; basically we’ll do whatever the client needs. It just happens that, curriculum-wise— and that’s what drives these tours, what they need to accomplish to enhance the curriculum—Boston, New York and D.C. cover just about everything. NTA: Why should a student travel planner work with Hawthorne Tours? Medler: First and foremost, it’s safety and security. When they book with us, we know what a school needs to accomplish and also know how to keep the students safe while they’re traveling. We make sure that there is security every night on every floor. That’s what they pay us to do. We hold all the confirmations, we reconfirm all the confirmations, we update the numbers, and we get the names of who is going to be on the floor every night for security. If a teacher or school administrator is trying to manage a tour and something goes wrong, what are they going to do? It’s that on-the-spot ability to fix problems while they are there and have a smooth transition without the students being impacted in any way, that’s the plus side. We constantly are with them and making sure that things go OK. NTA: Do you package some fun with educational components? Medler: Most of the fun things happen at night because during the day, we need to accomplish what the educators need them to. So at night we have options, and it depends on the budget for each group. We can have an in-house DJ, we take them to movies, we go bowling, do cruises, all kinds of fun things. It keeps them busy until about 10 p.m., which is terrific. We do a lot of theater, a lot of Broadway, depending on what the group’s needs are. We have a lot of theater groups, and that’s what they want to do the whole time; they’ll want to see three or four shows. NTA: What is an example of an experience that students can’t get in a classroom? Medler: There are things that happen on tour that are unexpected. One time when I was with a group, we had them line up on the Capitol steps to meet with their senator for a photo op, and the senator was due out any moment. I was standing there, and all of a sudden three or four black limousines came pulling up. This was when Barack Obama was a presidential candidate, and out he came from one of the cars. He came right up to our students and started shaking hands. They were able to take pictures, and the principal said “You could be shaking hands with the next president of the United States!” Things like that, the unexpected, will happen along the way that really make it [memorable].

Previous Page Next Page

Publication List
Using a screen reader? Click Here