The Unexpected Bonds of Student Group Travel

So your school group has decided to take a trip — how exciting! Maybe you are traveling to New York City to visit art galleries, or your marching band is headed to Walt Disney World to entertain the crowd in a parade down Main Street, USA. You may have added a clinic or workshop with a respected educator or conductor, at a university or backstage with Disney Imagination Campus. Those performances and workshops are, and should be, the main focus of your trip. These invaluable performance and learning opportunities can raise the level of your group’s abilities as they represent their school and community with pride! But student travel has many benefits beyond the sites. Let’s look at some of the ways a group trip can build life skills, expand your world view and strengthen the relationships within your group. The unexpected bonds of student music group travel will last a lifetime.

Student musicians and performers participate in fine arts programs for many reasons. Some just love music, or dance, or theatre and welcome the opportunity to get better and perform. Club and class groups love learning about culture and languages while immersing themselves in new surroundings. Others have friends who participate, so they join in to be able to share the activity with them. Still, others hope to pursue performance and teaching beyond high school. But all who stick with it demonstrate a level of dedication and perseverance beyond that of many of their peers. The time and effort that student participants dedicate to their craft is inspirational. One reward for that admirable dedication is the opportunity to travel with their peers.

For many students, a group trip is their first opportunity to travel without family, often to a destination they have never visited. The experience can be overwhelming at times, but with the guidance of staff members, chaperones and your Bennett Travel Tour Director, it will be an amazing opportunity to create lifelong memories.

This is the chance to build simple but important life skills such as negotiating sharing a hotel room with several other students. Whose turn is it to take a shower? What time do we have to wake up? Who is sleeping where? What do we need to bring with us tomorrow? Depending on the destination and itinerary, there is often free time built into the schedule. Choosing with your friends what you want to do with that free time, within the guidelines permitted by the chaperones, will foster independence and allow them to experience new adventures. Being responsible for their own personal items, including instrument, uniform, passport, wallet, phone and anything else they choose to bring requires thoughtful consideration and continued vigilance throughout the trip.

Being on a trip to an exciting destination allows them to expand their world view beyond your classroom, home and community. Embrace the experience! Read up about where you are going before the trip and be open and engaged while on the trip. Ask questions to any tour guides you have and interact with people to learn about the place you are visiting firsthand.St. Augustine

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
St. Augustine

Many consider the primary reward of participating in a group trip to be the bonding experience they have with their fellow students. Being away from their everyday comfort zone, experiencing new cultures and negotiating the stressful aspects of travel forces the student to work with others and to listen to each one another. In the end, the shared memories will connect them in often unexpected ways. Be it line dancing on a dinner cruise, exploring a Disney park together, sharing a meal at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, watching a sunset on a Hawaiian beach after a luau, renting bikes in Central Park or singing an impromptu tune in an Austrian cathedral, your group will arrive home with rich memories and renewed connections.

Begin planning your next travel experience today.