Educational Travel Opportunities | ILI Travel

Set out for new, exciting places with an Educational Travel Program that may forever change your outlook on life. We offer unforgettable travel experiences ranging from service learning to language immersion,and team sports to social justice opportunities.

All tour itineraries are designed with help from experts in the destination country and structured to provide the most complete, fulfilling, safe, and enjoyable educational experience possible.

A Comprehensive Educational Travel Program

Every Educational Travel Program provides:

Fair Trade wages
Local job creation
Sustainability – economic, educational, and/or environmental.
The ability to serve the needs of the local community, as determined by the people living there.
The chance to work side-by-side with locals.

Serving the Community is Top Priority

We contribute to economic sustainability wherever we go by staying in locally-owned hotels and eating in locally-owned restaurants.

When you return home the money spent abroad remains in that community. By contrast, when a typical American travels to the Dominican Republic and stays in a resort, very little money seems to reach the locals.

We hire a local transportation company that has a sterling reputation. In addition, we create local jobs by hiring bilingual leaders to facilitate discussions and to be there in case of an emergency. In some cases, we can hire a camp director, laborer, or English teacher from the local population.

Concerned for Your Safety

We put safety first. Our local, bilingual guide and our bus driver stay with us throughout the trip. That means they eat meals with us and board at the same hotel. In the event of an emergency, they know how to get to all of the local hospitals, medical centers, and pharmacies.

An Ethical Approach

There is a good way to approach volunteer service – and a bad way. It is important to us to practice ethics when we travel abroad.

Some examples:

Before taking our trips, some of our participants choose to start serving the community back home, whether it’s working with Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Chester County or a food pantry. They then apply that spirit of service to children in the Dominican Republic or Haiti.
We believe in paying fair trade wages and hiring locals where we travel. We also hire locals, so money we bring with us contributes to lasting economic sustainability in the countries we serve.

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity

Our educational adventures get rave reviews. One high school student from Montgomery County, PA, called her Dominican Republic trip “the best week of my life.” In fact, she even signed up for the same trip the following summer.

Examples of the terrific response to our program:

A soccer league and a basketball group are considering running a sports camp abroad.
Universities from Chester County and Bucks County, PA, are running a student trip that provides opportunities for an Educational Travel Program to examine prison reform, women’s issues, poverty, immigration, and more.
High school tours each year participate in a service learning trip, adventures that have proven to be so meaningful that many students have signed up for repeat trips year after year.

We have been talking with individuals and groups to the following student and volunteer opportunities for an Educational Travel Program:

Get Involved Today

Find out how an Educational Travel Program has students enrolling year after year to experience their tour again. See why college students are excited to visit an operational Dominican prison and understand how this country is supporting former inmates in their life after incarceration. Groups can contact us about a non-religious mission trip.