5 tips for offering the best experience on your school trips

Buses, canteens, laughs... Many of our best childhood memories take us back to those special days when the school ceased to be a building and became a global experience: school trips. In them, the strict dimensions that had surrounded us until then took a radical turn: teachers suddenly became just another adventure partner, and you discovered new facets of your classmates. Science, history, English or biology were beginning to take shape in the real world, outside of books, and a new sense of unknown maturity was taking its toll on everyone.

These memories give us a clue to the importance that school trips have for the growth and development of boys and girls. For this experience to remain in the memory of the youngest as something positive and transformative, it is absolutely necessary for families and schools to have exhaustive planning behind it, ranging from the choice of the trip to its reservation and execution.

If you want to make your agency a leader in planning school trips, keep reading. Here are our five tips to make sure that parents and schools only want to count on your agency for their next great educational experience.

‍1. Give the school everything done
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It's your time to present your homework: provide the school with all the information it may need in a presentation dossier that includes the school's brand, so that they feel completely identified with the trip from the beginning.

Remember that for families this is a very important moment: for many it may be the first time that their sons or daughters travel alone, so there can be no lack of information. It details, in a visual and clear way, the plans for each day, including accommodations, distances, even the names of the monitors and photos or comments from other years.

Remember that it is very likely that you will be asked for changes: you must be able to react quickly, adapting your proposal effectively so that the decision-making ball is always in your court.

‍2. When working with children, protection and privacy come first

‍The law on the protection of personal data and the guarantee of digital rights ensures that our data is secure, so we must be especially scrupulous when applying it when collecting data from minors. The most secure way is to send schools a single digital form to send to families and that collects all the personal data necessary for the trip, detailing the transfers or use we will make of them (hotels, wholesalers or airlines, for example). In this way, in a single register, the schools will send you the data and documents you will need for each stage of the trip. We recommend that you request only the information you are going to need: do not ask for data that you don't need, as it will be cumbersome for families and you will be responsible for additional data that is useless for the purpose of the trip.

Use the same form to obtain the authorization of parents or legal guardians to travel, as well as the transfer of image rights. Surely families will love to see the photos that the monitors are taking of them at every stage! And for your agency, it's very practical to have all the documentation stored in one place and always accessible, so we recommend that you use a form integrated with your CRM.

3. It offers payment facilities

A school trip can mean a considerable outlay for a family, so if you offer payment facilities, your customers will thank you for it: making a reservation deposit, fragmenting the payment, the possibility of a card or transfer... If, in addition, the payments are integrated into the same system where families have chosen their trip, confirmed the itinerary and left their details, their confidence will increase and your brand image will rise like foam.

4. Make all relevant information accessible

Families want simple solutions and, if possible, in a single space. They already have a class chat, a school app, endless emails from the AMPA, the digital book... Nobody wants to have to search for the details of the trip in four different locations: train tickets, the phone number of the emergency agency, the name of the hotel on the second night, if they pass through grandma's town on the way back or if the dinner menu includes seafood. Give them a single space where they can be sure of being able to access each and every one of the necessary data and documents.

5. Communicate with parents during the trip

School trips require special care, since the responsibility of helping to discover the world for a group of children is very great. For families, it is essential to know that children are well cared for, and for this reason, communication with your agency must be very fluid: provide them with a space that, without being invasive, gives them the peace of mind they need to know that their children's journey is going from strength to strength.
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A good school trip is something unrepeatable and unforgettable, and with these tips yours will be completely irresistible!
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Take advantage and don't miss the opportunity to get to know the features that MOGU Platform offers you for comprehensive management of proposals, payments and communication with customers. Of outstanding!