New Educational Travel e-learning program now open
Picture: Elina Manninen
Visit Finland has published a new e-learning program for educational travel suppliers. This e-learning program opens up new perspectives to educational travel and provides tested tools and best practices to support the necessary multi-professional collaboration. Even educational travel services need a clear focus, which builds on national and local unique selling points, in order to attract future visitor groups.
The purpose of the e-learning program is to support the Finnish travel and education industries in developing and implementing interesting and profitable year round educational travel packages for foreign customers.
From the travel industry point-of-view, one of the major challenges has been how to arrange the required educational content for the visitors. Prior to Covid-19, the amount of groups from China, in particular, rose significantly. The Chinese as well as other East Asian students often find studying in a Finnish school together with Finnish pupils an integral, and sometimes even the most important, part of the trip.
In order for the travel companies to have a better understanding of the public sector decision making in Finland, we have collected information and case studies on the operational models of educational travel from some municipalities and cities.
In order to support the service design, we have further collected examples of how the Finnish education style can be experienced even outside the school environment.
The educational travel packages are further influenced by the varying interests and culture-based needs from each market area. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly had its effect on the wishes and expectations of educational travelers from different source markets. Therefore, we try to open up what has changed during the past 1,5 years on each of the key markets of educational travel.
The Visit Finland internationalization criteria, safety perspectives, and sustainability, are all significant aspects when planning and implementing educational travel services. We hope that these practical recommendations for educational travel services will help you in taking all these perspectives into account.
The educational travel e-learning program consists of a variety of materials, including text, images and videos. We recommend to reserve enough time to carefully study the materials and maybe go through the program one chapter at a time. After completing the entire e-learning program, each participant will receive a certificate with his/her name and organization.
We hope that the e-learning program will promote new cooperation models and ways of working that will enable us to ensure a high-quality and sustainable educational travel product offering for years to come.
