This informal CPD article 3rd Party Travel Company Vetting was provided by Xcursion, a risk management training provider focused on school excursion & activity safety.
Understanding 3rd party providers
Travel companies and other 3rd party activity providers can be a great way of helping you plan for and run a much wider range of international tour programs with your students. Third party providers are any sort of organisation through which you can contract a service. For example, a bus company, a ferry company, a tour operator in Italy or a mountain biking company in France. Many schools contract out part or all of their programs to third party providers, especially when running overseas tours. These can ease the planning pressures which come with any sort of tour program and when teachers are so busy running so many different classes and activities they can often be heavily relied upon.
The need to be careful with providers
However, when contracting out to any 3rd party operator we need to be extremely careful as schools always hold the primary duty of care for their students and risk cannot be contracted out. Often 3rd party providers use statements in their marketing materials like, ‘We take care of everything!’ Which is simply not true. There are always areas of responsibility that the teacher running the program retain.
If you do see statements like this, you need to be really cautious because when they say we take care of everything, the reality is that they don’t know your students. They don’t know your staff. They don’t know the dynamics of your group, and these are all critical factors in the safe operations of your program. Many 3rd party providers can be extremely strong and great to work with as they bring a huge amount of local knowledge and experience to the program. They understand the in-country risks and the local environment in which you’re operating. However, you can never be assured that they’ll cover everything.
Primary duty of care remains with teachers
Ultimately, as a teacher you have the primary duty of care for your students, and this can’t be contracted out. For example, you’re responsible for the health, welfare and wellbeing of your students throughout each and every trip. We’ve often seen comments on travel sites saying, ‘it was wonderful, they did everything, they wrote the risk assessment for me.’ If you see that, it should make you nervous as this tells us that the staff on the trips aren’t actively engaged in the safety and management of risk for the tour. It’s like sitting in the passenger seat when you’re supposed to be driving the car. It’s never going to end well.
The importance of vetting providers
So, if you are contracting out some of all of your programs to 3rd part providers it’s vitally important to know their skill-level and capacity. Have clear communications in place so that you know what you’ve actually contracted out and who is responsible for what. These are just some of the many key considerations for when you’re working with travel companies and tour operators to help ensure your programs are built on a strong foundation of safety. They are a great way to help you build and run engaging programs with your students, but we must always remain vigilant in our approach to any 3rd party provider and conduct our due diligence well in advance so we can be confident we’re working with a good, reliable operator.
We hope this articles was helpful. For more information from Xcursion, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively, you can go to the CPD Industry Hubs page for more articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.
