We’re thrilled to announce that The Learning Adventure, in collaboration with CAS Trips , won the Best Partnership Award at the WYSTC – The World Youth & Student Travel Conference in Lisbon!
Forged in the heat of a Kenyan summer in the 1970s and solidified at WYSTC 2022, this partnership spans decades, generations, and encapsulates a shared commitment to providing transformative travel experiences for young people. At WYSTC 2022, the directors of The Learning Adventure and CAS Trips discovered that their mothers had traveled together in 1973. Inspired by this amazing student adventure, which took them from London to Nairobi via Cairo, Lake Nakuru, and the Rift Valley, we set about partnering together to emulate these unforgettable educational experiences for young people across the globe.
Our overarching goal was – and remains – to combine CAS Trips’ commitment to supporting the Sustainable Development Goals through ethical service-learning engagements with The Learning Adventure’s extensive experience designing bespoke educational tours across Asia. Through careful collaboration, we work to create tailored itineraries in Japan, China, and South Korea that combine structured educational programs and activities with locally-based, community-driven service and CAS experiences.
As our partnership has developed, we’ve gathered vital feedback which has informed how we develop tour programs moving forwards. One such example has involved developing a more in-depth pre-trip educational stage, whereby we work with CAS Trips to engage both students and teachers more directly on the topics that their travel program is designed to explore. This ensures that across both elements of the trip – educational and service – all parties can see their aims for the trip realized in real time.
Evaluating our itineraries is an extensive process that happens both before and after a tour. In the pre-trip stage, we work closely with CAS Trips to design a program that is measured against the Sustainable Development Goals and the school’s individual learning objectives. We’ll work on a case-by-case basis to ensure that the individual components suit the school’s overall ambitions for the trip – and clarify the proposed impact of the service experience on the local community that it serves. Following the trip’s conclusion, we’ll embark on our own quantitative and qualitative post-tour feedback process, where we’ll work with the educators from the tour to evaluate the success of both the educational and service elements. Any elements which are raised as needing improvements are addressed through an interview session, after which The Learning Adventure’s operational team will review, report back to CAS Trips, and amend as needed.
Whether it be assisting waste collection in Korea or reconstruction projects in Japan, we work closely with CAS Trips to ensure that the service elements of the tours that we create for their clients align with both their own personal development ambitions and the aims of the SDGs. Since 2022, we’ve taken 200 students across 10 schools from the USA, Egypt, and beyond on transformative tours across Asia in conjunction with CAS, where our average feedback score of 95% has been supported by consistent 5-star reviews. We’re committed to ensuring that our partnership continues to develop, creating life-changing tours for young people just like the one our mothers embarked upon, 51 years ago.
Remember, all of our trips are fully customisable. If you would like to speak to an educational specialist about planning a school trip then enquire now.
