You’re a busy teacher with enough on your plate already. Your school trip shouldn’t take over your life or cause you any more stress – we’ll support you every step of the way to make sure it doesn’t.
Creating your perfect school trip
Your quote will be put together by one of our experienced Tour Advisers.
They’ll be an expert in the subject area and will know the destination really well too. So they can help you to put together a trip that suits your group’s requirements and meets your learning objectives.
If budget is a concern, they can advise you on ways to keep costs down. This may include changing the type of transport, playing around with dates (if you can be flexible) and suggesting cheaper accommodation.
They can also chat to you about other activities that would still meet your needs but may be cheaper or even free.
Once you’ve locked in the key details of your trip (like your transport, accommodation, dates etc.) it’s time to launch it to parents and students.
Launching your trip to parents and students
Once you’ve decided where and when you’re going, the next step is to get your trip approved and then get students signed up to it.
We’ve created a ‘Trip Launch Pack’ to help you with this step.
This is full of resources designed to make your life easier at this crucial point in the trip-planning process.
As well as guides packed full of helpful tips, you’ll also find plenty of free downloads, including a school trip letter template, a PowerPoint template for your parents’ evening and even posters for you to put up around school.
Once your trip is approved and you’ve got enough students signed up, it’s time to book your school trip – and your Tour Adviser will guide you through this.
After you’ve booked
Now you’re all booked, your trip will be passed to an Itinerary Coordinator, to plan the finer details.
These folks are incredibly knowledgeable about the destinations they arrange trips to. Your Itinerary Coordinator will make sure that your itinerary makes the most of your time and is packed full of those ‘wow’ moments.
They’ll take on most of the admin tasks for your trip (freeing you up to do what you do best – teach).
And for the things that they can’t do for you (like your risk assessment, collecting the passenger information and creating the rooming list), they’ll be able to guide you.
We’ve also got some useful guides to refer to in the resources section of our website.
Support while you’re away
From lost property to properly lost, we’ll always be on the end of the phone while you’re out on the trip.
Just before you set off, we’ll send you a final info pack. And you’ll also have access to all of your trip documents from your phone or tablet, via the Vamoos app.
On both, you’ll find our emergency contact information. During office hours, you’ll be able to speak to staff at Halsbury HQ if you need any support or assistance.
And if the office is closed, you’ll just need to call the emergency contact number to get hold of us (even in the middle of the night).
With nearly 40 years of experience in arranging school trips, there’s very little that takes us by surprise. We’ve dealt with lost passports, volcanic ash clouds and plenty of storms (in fact, we’ve got a great record of dealing with the unexpected).
So, although the vast majority of trips go off without a hitch, if something does happen we’ll usually be able to get your trip back on track pretty quickly.
You may have a Halsbury rep with you on your trip (this is always the case with ski trips, and is something you can request for other trips). If you do, they’re pretty good at liaising with local suppliers (if you’re having issues with the hotel, for example). But you’ll still have our emergency contact information, just in case you need more help.
After your trip
Once you return from your trip, we’ll ask you to complete quite a detailed feedback survey. We know that you’re super busy, but we’d be really grateful if you could take the time to complete it.
Your feedback really helps us to continue to improve our service, so that we can support more teachers to provide these life-changing educational experiences for their students.
And it’s a great motivator for our team of Tour Advisors and Itinerary Coordinators who’ll be keen to find out how your trip went, after spending so long working on it with you.
Now’s the best time to start thinking about your next trip too, as it’ll all be fresh in your mind. Plus, the longer you can give parents to pay for the trip, the more affordable it will be for them, so it’s a win-win. We can get working on a quote for you right away – just get in touch with us.