7 Top Tips for Organizing Study Tours & MBA Trips

What do you need to think about when you’re organizing an MBA trip or study tour? A lot apparently! We've decided to make things easier by narrowing it down to our top 7 tips.

Planning a study tour or MBA trip is no easy feat. Aside from the normal things involved in planning a group trip, you also need to organize it around study and often around specific outcomes or business goals.

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Going on an MBA trip or study tour gives students the opportunity to explore other business regions around the world, and consider how economic, political and cultural contexts can influence business.

Or, sometimes, it’s just an end of study trip that gives them a chance to celebrate! Whichever one you’re planning, we’ve put together our top tips for organizing a student or MBA trip.

Purpose

What’s the purpose of the trip? Is it a study tour to enhance studies or a trip to relax at the end of the MBA program? You need to sort this early on because it will influence the rest of the trip planning.

If it’s a study tour that requires you to have specific outcomes related to the program then you’re going to need to be able to connect more with businesses where you’re traveling to, as opposed to a leisure trip.

You’ll also need to be able to outlay the purpose when you’re marketing so that you attract the right people to the trip.

Budget

Your next big consideration when planning an MBA trip or study tour will be the budget. How affordable will the trip be for students? Will they need to fundraise or is it something they should be able to afford within a normal budget? The budget will have a large impact on where you go as well.

Where

Consider a location that will enhance your study, and where you can easily connect with local businesses. Are you staying within the country or going international?

Do you want somewhere with low cost but not too much culture shock? Will you consider paying for a higher cost destination to have the right style of trip and get what you need out of it?

These are all questions to consider when you’re organizing where to have your study tour or MBA trip. It’s likely that the university or the particular courses will naturally influence the location of the trip, but there are still plenty of places in the world to choose from!

When

Study tours or MBA trips can take place during term time or university breaks, it really depends on the purpose of the trip and the university guidelines.

You need to consider breaks from university so that you’re not cutting into teaching time, or see if there is approval from the university for a study tour to be included as a subject within the curriculum.

Remember that the time of year you choose could have an influence on where you go because of seasonal changes in weather and popular times to travel, and also in the price of flights and accommodation in different seasons.

Market the trip

Once you’ve organized the study tour or trip itself you’ll need to market the trip. You can use tools within the university to do so, like emailing all eligible students, and utilizing social media if it’s available. Flyers are a still a good marketing option, especially at a university.

Set expectations

Make sure that the expectations for the study tour or MBA trip and clear to students who are interested in attending. If it’s a study tour then they need to realize it’s not a holiday, and they will likely be very busy visiting and learning from local businesses.

There will be defined targets and topics and specific outcomes that are expected. Even if it is a celebratory end of the MBA trip, students will still need to be made aware of what’s expected of them on the trip and what they’ll be doing.

Booking

Organising students for a study trip can be difficult, even if they are MBA students! You’ll want to be able to communicate easily with everyone, keep all information as central as possible and be able to easily organize payments.

That’s where a payment platform like WeTravel comes in. You can create a trip page, share it with the students and have them pay their deposits and final balances through the payment gateway. You’ll then be able to pay whoever you need to through there as well.

And then you can enjoy the trip! Planning an MBA trip or study tour can be stressful, but stick to these top organizing tips and you’ll find the process is much smoother.

Check out some previous MBA trip stories from our users here and here, and how WeTravel works to give you a central place to take payments and keep in touch with trip participants.