Behind the scenes: the making of our teen travel and service programs
If you are interested in The Road Less Traveled camp experience for yourself or your child, you might have wondered while looking through our summer 2024 trips what actually goes into the creation of a summer travel program?
The short answer to that question is: a lot of hard work! However, the fact that we maintain a distinctive philosophy greatly helps too.
From the earliest stages of creating and designing new teen travel programs, right through to our selection of the most meaningful locations, activities, and service partners, we always keep closely in mind the “why”, not just the “how”.
After all, it is the “why” we formulate student travel programs, that largely guides and directs the “how”, at every stage of our behind-the-scenes work. Let’s delve a little deeper into what we mean by that.
It’s not just about the ‘making’ of our adventure trips – it’s about the ‘making’ of your teen, too!
You might have already noticed, from reading about our summer 2024 teen travel and service programs, that they are not meant to be vacations. Sure, there might be no shortage of sun-drenched, picturesque scenery that would certainly merit sending a postcard back home… but that’s where the similarities end.
Instead, we devise our student travel programs with the intention that they will make a fundamental contribution to your child’s personal growth, thereby helping to set them up well for the rest of their lives. We use travel as a way for young people to grow their self-confidence, social skills, resilience, independence, leadership, and sense of service to their local community and our planet. As we design our new programs, we ensure the program can deliver on these outcomes, which is a top priority.
An informed and intentional travel program design process
None of the aforementioned results for our teen travelers happen by accident. It is why, instead of basing our adventure and service trips in the most obvious “tourist traps”, we seek out unique and natural places that present our travelers with opportunities to immerse themselves in stunning – but also challenging – landscapes and communities.
Speaking of immersion, we also weave cultural activities into our trips for an authentic travel experience, whether that might be meeting and practicing language skills with the locals, trying new food and meals or participating in regional traditions and events.
All the while, we also thoroughly research the geographical areas that we consider for our programs, and scout the trips to make sure genuinely high quality programs are created. We take particular care, too, to ensure our participants only visit and partake in community service or conservation projects where their efforts will be truly appreciated and needed.
These are just some of the considerations we take into account when designing travel programs. We haven't even mentioned the safety side, the ongoing search for the new exciting locations, and the way in which we identify new service projects and react to environmental demands. Maybe we’ll cover some of these in a future blog.
If all of these ingredients of the The Road Less Traveled camp sound like the right ones for you or your child, please don’t hesitate to schedule a call with an RLT director to learn more about how your child can get involved this summer!