Covid Safe Travel

Here at Student Horizons, with our extensive refund process almost complete, our attention is now turning to what travel looks like in a post Covid environment.

Consumer confidence around travel is slowly starting to recover for the domestic sector and it’s encouraging to see domestic operators starting to see some revenue flow through their businesses. For us, domestic travel in Australia and Trans Tasman travel will be the initial focus for us with our customers planning trips in 2021 and 2022. It’s difficult to say when Long Haul travel will become the norm again for schools but it’s fair to say it’s some way off.

Traveling post Covid will be different from what we know today and there’s no doubt that we will be travelling with the risk of Covid for some time to come. This continued Covid risk will change how all tour operators operate and we are looking to be at the forefront of those changes.

Safety has always been a cornerstone pillar of how we operate and we have an enviable track record of safely running 400 trips and taking over 12,000 students overseas. Organising safe travel is a specialised business and once educational travel resumes, we will be operating to the highest levels of Covid Safe travel standards.

We are currently collaborating with World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) who are leading the definition of industry best practices around safety in a post Covid era. For us, putting the safety of the students, teachers and staff remains at the core of everything we do.

We will implement global best practice around safety within our business and obtain the highest levels of global safety certification as evidence to our continued commitment to running safe and meaningful tours.

There will always be an inherent risk in travelling anywhere and 100% elimination of risk is simply impossible.

Our approach to safety is focused on 3 key areas:

• Our People – making sure our staff are trained to the highest safety standards and are experts in Covid Safe travel.
• Our Partners – we will ensure that every partner (airline, hotel, transport provider) shares our commitment to Covid Safe travel and has robust policies and procedures to keep our students safe.
• Our Policies and Procedures – we are adapting our Risk Mitigation and Incident Management framework to make it work in a Covid world – we’re already working with our insurers, scenario planning new situations such as quarantine and Managed Isolation to develop a series of new protocols for situations that only a few months ago seemed very farfetched.

Travel remains critical for young people in terms of expending their horizons and becoming global citizens and it’s heartening to see the continued support of schools and parents that reinforce this view.

Looking ahead to the time that schools start considering new overseas experiences, safety considerations will be a cornerstone pillar in rebuilding consumer confidence.

We are taking the time now to understand global practice and collaborate with industry bodies around the globe – ensuring that when groups start to travel again, parents, students and schools will be reassured that experiences run by Student Horizons will be amongst the safest anywhere in the world.