Educational Travel Services: Why Tour Managers Make All the Difference

July 15, 2016 Marc Amigone No Comments

Category ACIS Community, Pre-Trip Planning: Teachers, Tour Manager Spotlights, Your Tour Done Right

When most first-time group leaders contemplate taking their students abroad, they can be a little wary about taking on so much responsibility: being responsible for a group of teenage kids in a foreign country, shepherding them from place to place, arranging meals, booking entrances to museums, art galleries, and tourist attractions, etc. etc.

What a veteran ACIS Educational Tours group leader will tell you, however, is they wouldn’t even consider taking on that responsibility without the support of the ACIS overseas team, captained by their full-time tour manager. Leading a group with the support of an ACIS tour manager allows you as the group leader to arrive and let you enjoy the trip while your tour manager directs the action getting you from place to place, making reservations at restaurants and timed entrances to museums, etc. etc.

They guide the tour like a conductor in front of an orchestra, meeting you at the airport and not leaving your side until you’re on your way back home. Not only are they getting your group from place to place adjusting on the fly for any unforeseen changes in the schedule, but they’re teaching and imparting wisdom from a native’s perspective all the way.

Having the right tour manager takes your educational travel experience from good to great. Having someone with you 100% of the time who can not only handle logistics and fix problems as they arise but also provide insight into the sights and sounds around you allows you to take on an insider’s perspective you wouldn’t otherwise be able to accomplish.

At ACIS, we’re extremely proud of the world-class overseas team we’ve assembled over the years. Our tour managers come from a variety of countries across Europe, Latin America and Asia, and when they’re not guiding groups overseas, they work in careers such as journalism, acting, translating, photography, academia, television, marketing, law, and education.

48% of our tour managers speak 2-3 languages and another 48% speak 4+ languages. We ask 100% of our group leaders for feedback about their experience upon their return, and our tour managers consistently are rated Excellent or Good (and in the rare case that we do receive negative feedback, we disseminate that back to the tour manager to help them improve for next time).

Of the many things that make traveling with ACIS an exceptional experience, our tour managers top the list. Check out the infographic below to get a deeper look into what makes them so great at what they do: