The following information is designed to help you take care of all the details necessary to ensure a successful group tour. Having all the details taken care of will make your experience a wonderful time together!
Before Your Trip
**Pre-trip meeting and Registration: A Personal Tour Representative from Class Act Tours will provide your group a parent night outline of expectations with a DVD/Power point presentation to get your group excited about their trip. It is also important to have at least one group Team meeting with your chaperones to finalize the trip plans and answer any last minute questions from the chaperones. This is most effective about one month before your trip.
**Set the tone: While traveling with a school group, please stress to your students that they will be visiting several areas where there will be a Field Teacher educating us on certain issues. The Teachers strive for the same respect from their students as is required in the classroom. The presence of a learning attitude upon arrival will greatly increase the educational experience for your students. The more the students are prepared, the more they will gain from the travel experience.
**What to bring: Class Act Tours will provide you with a detailed list of items to bring and not to bring. Please make copies and ensure that each participant receives a copy.
Organize Your Group:
- Ten to twelve students per chaperone group
- Gender ratio as even as possible
- Separate pairs/groups of students that may distract each other
- Assign Motor Coach seats in advance
Arrange for Chaperones: We recommend one teacher or parent per 10-12 students. Please photocopy this Trip Planning Guide and give to each chaperone to review prior to taking the trip. Also, have copies available during the trip in case a chaperone may misplace theirs. Make sure each chaperone has a complete list of cell phone numbers of all adults on the trip.
Communicate to each chaperone the responsibilities they have including physically placing themselves at the front, middle, and rear of a group of students, whether they are on board the bus, waiting in line at a rest stop or at an attraction. Tempting as it is to congregate and chat with other adults, the team surveillance understanding and approach is very important. Class Act Tours will provide you with a Chaperon Handbook to help with your communications to fellow teachers on the trip.
Health Forms: Photocopy and hand out the health forms provided by Class Act Tours. It is your responsibility to collect one form from each student and assign one chaperone to be in charge of all the forms and follow through with any medical issues or medications a child may need during the trip. A parent’s signature is mandatory on each health form or the student will not be allowed to take the trip. The chaperone in charge of the health forms will also be responsible for organizing a complete first aid kit and making it easily available during the trip if needed. This chaperone will also be in charge of handling and dispensing all medications during the trip.
Departure Day:
Make sure all chaperones have each others cell phone numbers and that each student has their chaperones cell number and also the lead teachers cell number printed on the back of their name tag to have handy if needed.
It is important to remember to do head counts BEFORE departing every stop. Please note that it is not always possible stay on schedule. The motor coach operator from whom we’ve chartered your bus estimates the travel times indicated on your final itinerary. You will have rest stops and fuel stops and there are a number of variables that could alter the actual running time from your school to your destination. Usually at your last rest stop, your personal tour representative will be able to give you an accurate estimate of your arrival time.
Before you Arrive at the Hotel
Please review all of the safety rules before you unload at the hotel.
- Re-establish the rule that nobody gets off the bus before the chaperones
- Remind the students to find the fire stairs when they get to their assigned floors
- Ask the students to locate and read the emergency evacuation plan on the inside of their hotel room doors
- Review the lost student procedure
- Review the Rules of Conduct and Discipline while at the hotel
If someone gets separated from the Group:
If a student does become lost or separated from the group, he or she should go to a hotel, store, information booth, or security guard and call their assigned chaperon’s cell phone number located on the backside of their name tag.
Hotel Check in:
To avoid a lengthy check in procedure, it is recommended that you ask the students to remain on the bus while all chaperones and the Tour Representative enters the hotel to get all keys from the front desk staff. After the Tour Representative distributes the keys and hotel manifest to each chaperone, it is the chaperones responsibility to gather their students and have them remove their baggage fro the baggage compartments and go to their assigned rooms.
To avoid service charges for local telephone calls and long distance calls, we ask the hotel to disable the phones for outside calls and tell your students to make their calls to home from pay or personal cell phones. Class Act Tours always instructs the hotel to lock the mini bars and disable the telephones and pay movies for its groups, but as an added precaution you should remind your students that the mini bar, long distance telephone and pay movies are prohibited.
When you get settled into the hotel, you should plan to set a time with all of the chaperones and tour representative to review the itinerary from beginning to end before you depart from the hotel again.
It is highly recommended to arrange for a wake-up call for the entire group each evening at the front desk. Remind each chaperone that they are responsible for their own small group even at the hotel, especially regarding curfew and wake up calls.
Conduct and Discipline:
We have come to expect that some students may behave differently while away from home on a class trip. It would be good to subtle remind them that they’d be in serious trouble if they misbehaved. There are two categories of rules that your students should understand and observe while on their trip. The first one is the mandatory rules of hotel etiquette that affect other hotel guests.
Hotel Guidelines:
Class Act Tour groups loves staying in nice hotels! Our groups are welcomed in first class hotels only as long as the students on our trips are consistently well behaved. Please remember that many hotels are offering their guest’s 100% satisfaction guarantees, and giving them refunds if they are not satisfied for any reason. So, a hotel guest whose sleep is disturbed only needs to complain about noise in the hallways or in another room to collect a full refund. Class Act Tours must agree to refund the hotel any money it may loose because of unreasonable noisy or otherwise inappropriate behavior on the part of the group members. So, we ask for your help in maintaining our good hotel relations, by discussing with your students the importance of good behavior. Some things to keep in mind:
**No loitering in the hotel lobby
**No Running
**No Shouting
**No slamming doors
**Curfew no later than 10:00pm
**Observe the dress codes in public areas by not wearing pajamas and not walking in bare feet.
We found that by having a student volunteer, (perhaps a likely violator of the rules), give a lesson on hotel etiquette on the motor coach mic each night, that the rules stick better.
The second set of rules for a group are not mandatory, however, they are suggestions we highly recommend:
**Keep hotel room doors open at all times if students are coming and going in each others rooms, until curfew time.
**Allow no mixing of boys and girls in the same room
**Do not allow students to leave their assigned floors. Keeping everyone on their assigned floors serves two purposes: Separating certain students who can getting into mischief and reduces endless elevator riding which can be annoying to other hotel guests.
Your Personal Tour Representative will not handle any forms of discipline; however, it is important to inform your Rep if a discipline issue occurs. Discipline and student correction will be referred to and handled solely by your chaperones and lead teacher.
Getting Around:
Always keep in close communication with your Class Act Tour Representative, especially if a group is running late. If you choose to change the itinerary, please discuss it with your Representative first. The best way to avoid any misinterpretation of the schedule, or the next pickup point and time is to have a meeting of minds with your Tour Representative and with all of the members of your group every time you separate yourselves from the bus. Because each group seems to move at it’s own pace, we would like to ask for your help, if necessary, in making sure your group doesn’t fall too far behind schedule. Your Representative is trained to keep ahead of the kids mentally, and will do his or her best to keep the group on schedule, but the chaperones have a large responsibility to keep their group on schedule.
Tipping:
Most chaperones collect the bus diver tips on the first day, to ensure the students don’t run out of money. The normal tipping per person per day is $3.00-$4.00 and is usually put into a card signed by the students and given to the driver the morning of the last day.
