Learn while you travel

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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