Why Travel with GEEO?

Our mission as a non-profit organization is to make travel for educators affordable, educational, enticing and easy. There are a few differences between a GEEO program and a regular tour operated by a tour company:

•You get to travel with a wonderful group of teachers! Our groups are also, small, averaging 11 people.

•We often have school visits on our trips. When schools are closed due to a country’s summer vacation we sometimes are able to eat a meal with a group of local teachers and have a Q and A session.

•We make the trip educational for our participants through experiential learning on the trips. No long classroom lectures! G Adventures provides us with their best, most experienced tour leaders who are prepared to share their knowledge with our participants.

•We give you resources to expand your knowledge about your GEEO destination. Our book club is a way for you to have a shared educational experience with other members of your group. Our Pinterest page is an ever growing source of lesson plans, travel tips and interesting articles. These resources will give you a basic understanding of customs, history, culture, current events, etc. before arriving, which puts everything into context and allows for a deeper experience.

•We provide structure for bringing your travel experience back into your classroom through our easy to implement Education Program. Our lesson plan database is a great and growing collection of examples of classroom action plans from past GEEO participants. You will love the Google Earth presentation we share with you!

•Each participant gets a free professional development certificate. This way you can advance your careers while on vacation.

•For an extra fee of $600, participants can also earn 3 graduate credits from the University of Wisconsin.

•Each trip is a professional development program specifically for educators and because of this many past participants have been able to find grants and funding to subsidize their program expenses.

• All of our programs are discounted to be 5% to 10% lower than the price of equivalent trips run by our tour operator partner G Adventures. G Adventures arguably offers the best value in the travel industry due to their size, so our prices can’t be beat. GEEO aims to make our programs fall within any teacher’s budget. In fact many of the programs cost little more than domestic travel.

• Our participants are able to get Humanitarian Rate flights (which tend to be about 2/3 the cost of commercially available tickets) and travel health insurance because of our non-profit status.

•We handle customer service with a very personal touch. We answer all emails promptly and can be reached by phone 9AM-9PM, 7 days a week. There is no application process for our programs making it easy to join. We can help you book flights, purchase insurance, get visas and vaccinations, etc. We can hold your hand and walk you through the process so that international travel isn’t so intimidating.