Loans and Financial Aid for Educational Tours

Going on a trip abroad can be the highlight of a young student's academic year. Financing these trips can be difficult, but loans and other forms of financial aid are available.

Motivating older secondary school students and college students can be difficult. One thing that can help teenage students to remain excited about learning a foreign language, practicing their performance art, or training hard in their chosen sport is the opportunity to travel. Unfortunately, not all parents can afford the expense of a typical holiday abroad and many of them don't have good enough credit ratings to arrange their own travel loans.

Finding Affordable Trips
As a trip organizer, finance should be a major consideration. After ensuring that your students will be safe, making the trip as affordable as possible for as many people as possible is essential. One way to ensure that the trip is affordable is to look for group booking discounts. Organizations such as Brightspark work with travel companies to negotiate discounts for student groups. For a group of twelve or more travellers the discounts can be substantial.

The discounts that Brightspark offers are just a part of the equation, however. You still need to make sure that the trip is paid for. If you've ever tried to collect money for a student trip from an entire classroom worth of children, you know how messy and difficult managing finances on that scale can be. Foreign trips are even harder to organize since you need to ensure that every student has a valid passport and the cost of the trip is greater so last-minute dropouts are more common. Anything that you can do to ease the financial burden will be appreciated by your student's parents.

Sponsored Travel and Loans
One option is to take out a loan to finance the educational trip. If you have written agreement to pay from each parent that wants their child to go and you are confident in your school or youth group's ability to pay the cost of the trip even if a parent fails to come through, then this is a good option.
Read the terms and conditions of each loan carefully. Look for a company that is sympathetic to educational establishments and offers a relatively low interest loan. In addition, be sure to take out cancellation insurance   the last thing you want is to end up owing money for a trip that did not take place
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Another option is applying for sponsorship. There are many companies and organizations that will sponsor trips through popular educational travel booking portals. Sports related trips and trips for performing arts groups tend to be quite popular with sponsors. If you put together a good proposal, you stand a good chance of attracting the interest of a group that can offer financial aid.

Running an educational trip is challenging, but your students will appreciate the effort. For many young people, an educational trip abroad   be that for a sports game, a festival, or simply a foreign exchange trip, is their first experience of the world outside of their home town.