By on December 23rd, 2015

3 Organizational Tips for International Student Group Trips

If your institution offers student group trips to the United States (or if you’re considering offering them) for study abroad and ESL studies, you can make your life easier as an organizer with a few simple tips. Just by following these, you’ll make your job easier and give your students a more fulfilling and educational experience.

Get Help Placing Your Students in Homestays

First of all, once you have everyone signed up for the program, it’s easy to find deals on blocks of plane tickets, but the same isn’t necessarily true for room and board. If your group is only staying for a couple of days, a hotel may be an appropriate choice, but if you’ll be staying for a week or more, this option is simply too expensive for most students and institutions.

Instead, partner with USH, and we’ll place all of your students in homestays to enhance their experience and give them the most affordable and valuable room and board available.

Publish and Enforce Deadlines

Here at USH, we successfully placed 25 students from Iraq who were attending ASU for a couple of months. The only problem was, there were actually supposed to be twice that number, but visa delays stopped half of them from making the trip. If you set your deadlines with enough time to handle issues like this and you’re strict with enforcing them, then you shouldn’t have any problems with getting everyone to their destinations.

Provide Your Students With an Itinerary ASAP

As soon as you have placement handled, flights booked, and ground transportation taken care of, you’ll want to give your confirmed students a complete schedule that details where and when they need to meet for their journey. Provide them with everything they’ll need to know so that they will be sure to arrive at their homestays when someone is there to greet them, and you should have no problems.

Have Phone and Email Information for the Whole Group

Finally, make sure that you have updated contact info for the whole group so that you can get in touch with everyone for events and activities during their stay and so that you can help individual students if they have any problems when traveling.

As far as issues with homestays, USH provides continuous support for host families and students during their stays. Get in touch with us and find out more today!