From the 8th to the 11th of October, more than six hundred professionals from the youth tourism and student travel industry will be gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, for the 28th annual meeting of the World Youth Student Travel Conference (WYSTC)
Three experts from the WYSTC community will be taking part in a panel discussion on the theme of “Safety: Who defines it and how do we ensure it?” The discussion will aim to answer questions about and provide assurances regarding quality and safety when it comes to international educational travel experiences for young people. Establishing internationally recognized standards and certification/accreditation schemes are some approaches for standardizing quality, safety and other variables. The theoretical question underneath all this is who defines those standards.
The panel will be moderated by Tom Jenkins, CEO of the European Tourism Association (ETOA) and will comprise presenters Christina Thomas, Divisional Vice President for Youth Exchanges at World Learning; Andrew Procter, Managing Director of African Impact; and Joël Marier, Vice President, EBI Consulting Group.
Key elements of Joël’s presentation will cover industry trends and consumer needs, EBI’s experience with certification and travel risk management, as well as a future ISO standard on managing risk for youth and school trips (currently being developed).
Also during WYSTC, EBI will be issuing a travel safety certification: our first to a WYSE-TC member. It will be presented to Kim Carvajal of Study Buddy Tours in Vancouver. This certification process all started with Kim, the CEO of Study Buddy Tours, taking ten minutes to do our online self-assessment.
If your organization is interested in assessing its travel safety policies and practices, please take a few minutes to fill in our free online EBI Risk Self-Assessment Tool. It is a questionnaire which will score your organization in the following five areas:
• Administration and Finance
• Communication
• Training
• Safety and Security
• Commitment and Accountability
Following the self-assessment, those who have filled in the questionnaire receive a free report benchmarking your organization against similarly-sized or related organizations in our database in your industry along with EBI commentary on how to improve.
For more information, please contact us at joel.marier@ebiconsulting.ca.
