Skift Take
Student travel is a market that travel brands have been serving for many years, but some brands now better understand its value and realize that giving students a great experience while they're young likely leads to repeat business when they're older.
The U.S. student group-travel market is one of the best for repeat business. A $5.6 billion market, travel brands should be doing more to court it.
That's the view of the Student Youth & Travel Association, which promotes U.S. domestic and international student and youth travel. The association surveyed more than 2,100 U.S. teachers, group leaders, tour operators and international tour operators from 70 countries between August 2013 to November 2015 to measure the impact of student travel.
The survey considered students up to 18 years old, and primarily those taking trips in middle school and high school, and focused on the importance of teachers in the travel planning and organizing process.
Student travel is mostly group travel, said Carylann Assante, the association's executive director, but a trip is the brainchild of a teacher. U.S. teachers organize an average of 1.7 trips per academic year and travel with 59.7 students per year for domestic and international trips.
Nearly two-thirds of domestic U.S. student trips are for destinations within 50 miles from a school or within the same state as a school, according to teacher respondents. U.S. tour operator respondents, however, said that 62 percent of their student trips involve traveling through more than one state.
Both U.S. teachers (66 percent) and tour operators (5
