School trips can be an enjoyable way for students to learn and experience the wider world. When worked into the curriculum properly, it can be a way to highlight and enhance their lessons. There’s a lot of work involved in them, however.
While you might have a grasp on managing students in a classroom environment, it could be more difficult to do so outside. That’s compounded when you have travel and hotel arrangements, alongside multiple other activities, to handle.
When it comes to planning this out, it could be quite costly. If a school trip is too expensive, many parents may protest and refuse to let their children go. They mightn’t be able to afford it. Can you make the school trip costs more affordable?
Thankfully, there are a few simple ways to do so. Hiring a student travel company is an obvious method, although there are others.
How To Make A School Trip More Affordable
Avoid “Drive Through The Night” Driving
Quite a few people assume that traveling in the early mornings or late nights is an easy way to keep school trip costs low. That could be the wrong approach. If you’ve hired a driver, they can only drive a maximum number of hours in a day.
Choosing early mornings and late nights could mean needing more than one driver. That will quickly add to the costs, so you’ll want to avoid it. Avoiding this also means you and the students are not exhausted for the day.
Make Sure The Bus Is Full
The more people on a trip, the less it will cost per person. When you’re booking travel and hotels for the school trip, you can expect a particular group rate. That will then be divided by the number of students, which will give you how much they can expect to pay.
Fewer students means they’ll have to pay more. Filling up the trip will minimize the expense for them, even though the overall cost of the trip will remain the same.
Travel On Weekends
You mightn’t think that planning the school trip for the weekends would be a recommended option. You’d expect this to be the more expensive option. That’s typically outside of the school year or during holiday periods, however. During the school year, it could be more affordable to book hotels for and travel during the weekend.
As the trip could be seen as a business trip for the school, you could book hotels and travel companies that specialize in these. They’ll be busier during the workweek itself, which makes spaces then more expensive.
If you’re open to spending time during the weekend traveling, then this would be a recommended option.
Wrapping Up
Parents will have multiple other costs associated with their children’s schooling. Books, uniforms, and much more can be quite expensive. Adding in a school trip to that could be outside of their budget. While putting in the effort to reduce the school trips costs could be more work, you’ll avoid putting undue stress on the parents.
It’ll also mean that more students are likely to go on the school trip. That makes the effort more than worth it.