How many skills do you think can be learned while traveling?

Have a guess - 5? 10? 20? Keep going. (If I were in the audience of the Price is Right I’d be shouting “higher!” at you.)

At least 40.

Yes, Four. Zero. And that’s not even taking into account task-specific skills, like learning to rock climb, kayak, or cooking. That’s just the list of easily transferrable, basic life skills that can have a huge impact on your education and/or career.

At first, I was going to call this blog post “why we offer adult trips as a teen travel company” and I was going to explain how a significant percentage of the fee for our adult trips supports our social mission to help more teens travel - which it does. I was going to explain that travel is expensive - which it is. And I was going to highlight that choosing Ignite Travel over other tour companies provides you with an excellent trip and a chance to make a difference in a teen’s life.

But, as I sat to write that blog post I thought, “Yeah but so what?” Because I often get looks, you know the looks that big dreamers get when they talk about their audacious plans, and more often than not, actual words, that say to me that they can travel when they are older. They can save up, get a job, learn travel hacking, etc. They can do what we all do and have our vacations (look for another blog post in the future -what’s the difference between vacations and travel) a few times a year or they can backpack cheaply around the world like other college students and twenty-something adults have.

So the foundational question to ask and answer became not “How does your adult trip help a marginalized teen to travel?” but “Why is it important - even life-changing - to prioritize helping marginalized teens travel in the first place?”

And it’s right there at the top of this post. Because there are over 40 transferrable education and career life skills to be learned when someone travels. It doesn’t even have to be out of their own country, state, or even their city for travel to teach those skills. But - in our interconnected world - we are creating a new generation of global citizens. And who doesn’t want to see them be more empathetic, more resilient, more adaptable, more innovative, more humble, and develop research, planning, goal-setting, and budget management skills, all at the same time - and that’s just 9 of the skills!

Travel is one of the unique ways in which they have the opportunity to learn all 40 of those skills in a short period and see somewhere really special. Marginalized teens, particularly those that have socio-economic barriers to travel, are often pushed into career skills programs, tutoring programs, mentoring programs, workforce shadowing programs, and educational programs as a way to keep them occupied and to turn them into productive citizens.

There’s nothing wrong with all of those programs or their goals. They each have their place in a young person’s life, especially for a teen who lives in an area where opportunities for advancement educationally and economically are thin on the ground. But, what if they were given the chance that their wealthier and in many ways, more privileged, counterparts have every summer, winter, and spring break? These experiences that are often just “part of growing up” for many teens. What if, through travel, they were allowed to experience something truly special that offered them the freedom and space to explore and reflect on being excellent humans, not just economically productive citizens?

This is why we run adult trips as a teen travel company. We don’t want them to have to wait until they’re adults to experience the life-altering change that can happen when one travels. We want to help as many marginalized teens experience travel and provide them with the knowledge and support of caring adults, who happen to be professionals at working with teenagers and helping them internalize their experiences so they can learn those 40 skills (plus more!) and reflect on them. This will be done through our proprietary travel journals which are a key component of what makes Ignite Travel so different. Part souvenir of their trip, part evidence-based documentation of the skills they are learning on their adventure - the Ignite Travel journal will help them take these skills and transfer them back to their lives at home in a practical way.

It’s our unique approach to travel and its ability to teach a multitude of skills in a short time, coupled with this multi-generational approach to creating a community of travel lovers, that we believe will change the face of teen travel and hopefully the lives of many marginalized teens in the future. We invite you, adults reading this, to join us in our mission by booking a spot on one of our adult trips or signing up to receive updates about trips we will be adding in the future.

What do you think are the most important skills learned while traveling?