Educational travel growing

Rhoda Flaxman had grown tired of beach vacations and became intrigued when she heard about a trip co-sponsored by her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College.

It promised a thorough learn­ing experience about the lives and experiences of women in Jordan, including meetings with a human rights attorney, a liter­ature professor and Jordan's first female ambassador to the United Nations.

Flaxman, an English profes­sor at Brown University, isn't normally one for group travel but is reconsidering given the strong educational focus of her Jordan trip.

"We felt as though we were really getting a very good view of the country," she said.

Universities and museums have organized learning-orient­ed trips in the past, but the trend has been booming in recent years and now is 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. 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.

Abercrombie & Kent runs ed­ucational tours for Harvard and other universities, but also has 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.

Companies that traditionally operated basic package tours also are finding their way into offering more value-added serv­ices like educational trips, says David Cogswell, a senior editor at Travel Weekly, an industry publication.

First Choice, a large package holiday company based in Brit­ain, found profits under pres­sure as more people book cheap flights and hotel rooms on their own. That led it to purchase more than 10 operators of more hands-on, "experiential" travel, Cogswell said.

Janet Moore, whose Long Beach, Calif.-based travel compa­ny Distant Horizons organized the Jordan trip and others to Iran and Afghanistan, says she's seen enormous growth in inter­est in educational travel over the past five years.

Moore, who sits on an advi­sory committee for a national conference on educational trav­el, said the sheer growth in at­tendance speaks to the surging interest in the area.

When the Educational Travel Conference started 18 years ago, only 15 to 20 institutions came looking to arrange educational trips. Last year there were 140 and more than 200 are coming to this year's meeting, which began Tuesday and runs through Fri­day in Baltimore.

"This is a booming area," Moore said. Many of her clients are 55-plus, right at the cusp of the baby boomer generation that is heading into retirement with more time and money to spend.

A survey of U.S. travelers tak­en last year by the Travel Indus­try Association found that 56 percent said they were interest­ed in taking an educational trip and 22 percent said they were more interested now compared with five years ago.

Travel programs are still a growth area for universities. Karen Anthony, director of alumni travel at the University of Notre Dame 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.

AHI International Corp., which runs alumni travel pro­grams for more than 200 schools, has seen increasing interest in more exotic locales, said Liz Harrison, spokeswoman for the Rosemont, Ill.-based company. AHI has added trips to Bhutan, Ukraine, South Africa and Chile, all in the past three years, she said.

Even among the most sea­soned organizers of expedition travel, there are signs that trav­elers are becoming more sophis­ticated and curious about the destinations they go to.

Sven-Olof Lindblad, whose fa­ther Lars-Eric organized the first commercial tours to Antarc­tica, the Galapagos and Easter Island with a company he found­ed in 1958, Lindblad Travel, says the discussions on his tours have increasingly focused on en­vironmental topics such as glob­al warming.

So much so, in fact, that a new trip that his company Lindblad Expeditions is an­nouncing this week will bring people to the Arctic with three of the top scientists studying cli­mate change today. That 10-day trip will cost about $5,000.

"People are finding it more valuable to learn something while they travel and to have that experience when they come home," Lindblad said.

Others come to educational travel for their kids. Or in the case of Barbara Collins, a retiree living in Leland, Mich., for her eight grandkids.

When each grandkid turns 13 he or she gets a letter promising a trip with the grandparents to any country in the world -- "as long as it's politically stable," adds Collins -- and so long as they find something to learn on the trip and write in a journal about what they learned there.

Their last trip, to the Galapa­gos islands, was "quite a mind-blowing experience," Collins said. "We hope that this will en­courage travel for the children and learning outside the class­room situation."

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