Learn while you travel

updated 7:09 p.m. ET Feb. 20, 2007

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 is now 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 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.

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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 are also 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 is being held Tuesday 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.

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