Educational Travel Sounds Terrrible, Yet It’s Our Speciality!

The Issue with Educational Travel

Let’s be honest: educational travel sounds like a painful necessity.

Something involving clipboards, soggy sandwiches, and a museum where the taxidermied animals have a suspicious smell.

Educational travel suggests you leave your personality behind and submit to something character-building.

It certainly doesn’t scream holiday or suggest that your problems with showing up confidently in English will be fixed through healthy, relaxing times.

Put all 10 Toes in Culture

Educational travel sounds as boring as F.

I never use it to describe how Blue Noun helps. Instead, I tell strangers we have one foot in education, one foot in travel, and all 10 toes wriggling about in culture.

I feel this paints a picture of our wild sauna-laced adventures exploring Scotland; studio visits with local artists, cheese tastings, riverside hikes full of deeply personal moments when your English finally clicks—not because you studied harder, but because you started living it.

The Language Dilemma

But in this world, your business concept needs to be in a clear category to Google, or potential clients will never find you.

They’ll never even wonder what having your toes wiggling in culture actually means, never mind getting the chance to find out for themselves.

An Alternative Language School

During COVID, we weren’t “educational enough” for the education grants.
We weren’t “touristy enough” for the tourism ones.

We still don’t even show up right on Google My Business.

First, we put our global category as ‘language school,’ but just looked like a shit one with, ‘”no desks or classrooms” as a flaw, not a choice. 

When I recently changed it to tourism, we were suddenly competing with tour firms that offer to share ‘The whole of the Scottish Highlands in 1 Afternoon’.

That’s not our style at all!
We help through Deep Travel. 

What we do doesn’t fit the usual models.

And that’s our point.

We don’t offer just another sightseeing trip with a few English phrases thrown in.

We give you something transformational: a holiday that discovers your voice in English.

What’s in a Name?

I once met a girl whose job had involved naming paint colours.

I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of simple marketing. Given the choice between Cowpat Splat, Musty Olive, Grecian Dawn or Butterfly’s Tears, we all know which we’d pick—no matter the actual hue of green.

I’d imagined debates over mahogany tables about choosing the names for each shade (or a poet in a garet–best job ever), but she said the whole company usually just got pissed together and made them up.

I’m Settling for Educational Travel.
(You Don’t Have to Settle for Anything).  

I’ve thought long and hard about how to describe our holidays.

• Conversation Holidays
• Real-world English Retreats
• Live English Encounters… I’d love to hear your suggestions!

Imagining it for You

The problem is that if you don’t know that this kind of freedom of language acquisition is an option, you are probably searching for educational travel + English (and getting bombarded with corporations offering mass-market language classroom holidays.

I hope this blog helps you discover that there are more ways to learn English on holiday than sitting in a classroom!

Share this message with someone who needs to hear it!

If you are looking for help finding an English teacher, we have a similarly terribly named English Needs Analysis — but don’t let the name put you off. It’s not as dry as it sounds. 
It’s a one-off conversation about you, your English, and what you want it to do for you. Ask us anything!

Think of it as the start of your new English story.