case study
Organising over 1200 flights for our client
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Organising the biggest-ever international school trip abroad was the task at hand for our Brighter team of event experts.
flights organised
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trip to China
schools involved
The Challenge
Booking more than 1200 flights
The University College of London (UCL) was leading a Mandarin Excellence Programme (MEP) but this was not your average school trip - more than 1,200 students and nearly 160 teachers, from 61 schools – needed to travel to China.
This was to be planned in over a period of a couple of months, with the 10-day trip aimed at improving pupils’ Mandarin language skills and cultural awareness.
Being delivered by IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society on behalf of the Department for Education (DfE), the trip was in partnership with the British Council, with support from the Centre for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC).
We had to ensure safe travel there and back for all the groups from the different schools.
It was to be the first major trip to take place since the pandemic, following a pilot visit involving 132 students last year.
The team had to arrange group flights to travel to a number of different cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi’an, Chengdu, Kunming, Shenyang, Dalian, Hangzhou, Shenyang and Guangzhou.
We split groups into schools, giving these individual parties names, and liaised with the airlines to issue tickets, while also providing the airlines with dietary requirements within the deadlines. We did all this while working with UCL to make sure this information was correct and received punctually.
The team shared the brief with our colleagues at Clarity24 for out of hours which included details of flights and who was travelling along with key UCL contact details.
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The result
Everything went ahead with out a hitch
The whole programme was a success with minimal issues over the full couple of months of travel.
The MEP is a flagship initiative which has helped more than 11,000 young learners in England on the path to fluency in Mandarin since its launch eight years ago.
The pupils got to engage extensively with pupils in Chinese summer schools throughout the experience.
We had several calls with the client throughout the project, along with calls after, for improvement for next year’s trips in terms of airline provision.
Virgin have removed their flights for next year on this route so we have already started looking into the routes and airlines for next year in the initial stages.
This project was a year in planning – we’ve already started looking at next year’s trip already.
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