The college years are a time for self-exploration and discovery for students, seeking with eager eyes new adventures – when they aren’t buried under textbook rubble gasping for air. Once study time is over there’s room for exciting enterprises (maybe not of the intergalactic kind), but when the pantry’s full of mac n’ cheese, ramen noodles, and peanut butter, world travel seems financially out of reach. With EF College Break Tours it may not be.
EF College Break Tours (EFCB) runs group trips during Summer, Spring, and New Year breaks to virtually every continent except Antarctica for college students across the U.S. It is part of a larger student travel organization with more than 29,000 employees, teachers, and volunteers working in 54 different countries, according to their website.
Besides being able to see amazing places like Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Thailand, and Australia, EFCB provides an “everything included” trip. No matter where you decide to travel with this company, airfare, hotels, and a full-time tour director are staples of your trip. Also provided are sight-seeing tours, travel between cities, breakfast every day, entrance into select attractions and 24-hour emergency phone service. But worry not, dear freedom-loving explorers, there is still plenty of free time to traverse the landscapes on your own.
The EFCB website advertises the lowest prices around; like Wal-Mart, find the same for less anywhere else and “we’ll match the price.” Their site also has a page to provide you with price quotes for all their trips starting in 2013. On American Airline’s website a price quote for a round-trip flight from Miami International Airport (this is still fairly close to Orlando as an example) to Paris can range from $500 to over $6000. A trip with EFCB to London, Paris, and Rome during New Years – this includes nearly every major expense for the trip – comes to about $2925. When travelling on your own, your entire expense could be significantly higher than that.
Katie Baxley is the campus manager at UCF for EFCB. Much like a campus representative and travel agent, she can get you set up with exclusive discounts if you book a trip with her. She has been on two different EFCB trips that went to Italy, Greece, and Turkey. She told Her Campus how readily information was available to her regarding her trip and the convenience of payment. When her group arrived, her tour director was there and ready to go. “Throughout both trips I never felt unsafe or lost,” Baxley said, “because they provide you with everything you need from a tour director who knows the language to a cheat sheet with little translations like ‘how much.’” The tour director also handles the hotel and travel information.
For Baxley, it was surreal being in the places she’d seen in pictures and on TV. She said Turkey was particularly interesting because it is a Muslim country. “They have the prayer call from the mosque during the day which was so neat to hear and see…it was like we had just stepped into Aladdin. There were carpets, lamps and belly dancers literally everywhere! It was a really cool place and the people were so friendly and welcoming.”
Katie’s Contact info:
Phone: (727) 688-1106
Email: kbaxley16@gmail.com
Check out EFCB’s Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/EFCBatUCF/
The Qualifications
*You must be between age 18 and 26 – you do not have to be enrolled at a University to participate in a trip
Baxley said her best memories are from her EFCB trip. “Traveling abroad translates into your life much more then you’d expect. You know more when you’ve actually seen it in person! If you can do it, it would be a mistake to pass it up.”