EF Educational Tours

We booked a trip through school (paid for insurance) then Covid happened. I get it.no one planned on a pandemic.

They cancelled our trip planned for 2020 with no eta for reschedule.

One of my kids would have been too old to travel by the time reschedule. I asked for a refund and they said no.. I eventually got back some of my money. They kept $1500 for insurance and work they had done from Feb 2020 till aprox March 2020; really???

They supposedly had to pay for the arrangements they made for the trip. Hello a pandemic shut down all travel.

I absolutely would not recommend them or their shady business practices.

4 years later and still $1500 out.

I am a teacher that took many trips abroad and acquired a lot of reward points. I decided to take time off from teaching when I had my first child.

I was reassured beforehand that my reward points would never expire. I checked many times throughout the past few years and sure enough, they were still there. I checked last week and they were gone. Apparently I was "misinformed" , and they expire every 4 years.

I "should have read the terms and conditions".

They offered me absolutely nothing, and would not even give me the above manager's phone number because "she doesn't have one". I will never take a trip with this company again, nor will I recommend it to families who are thinking about it.

Our son was signed up for an EF Educational Tours trip to Germany and Switzerland. We had been paying monthly installments for a year and a half when we were informed by the school 4 months before the trip was to take place that the tour was cancelled.

Upon calling EF Educational Tours to receive a refund for the cancelled tour, we were informed that we would have to pay a $585 cancellation fee ($95 cancellation fee - which we were aware of- and a $490 insurance fee, of which we were not aware), even though it was the school that cancelled the trip, not us.

EF Educational Tours's position is that because THEY were not the ones that cancelled the trip, the trip was therefore not considered cancelled at all, since we could have rebooked our son on one of the school's other tours, none of which were of interest to us.

In researching EF Educational Tours online, we find countless terrible reviews exposing the company as a scam.

Many other families have also been forced to pay the same $585 fee for trips that they themselves did not cancel - it seems to be part of their business model. The company has a 1.16/5 star rating from the Better Business Bureau and the Attorney General of Colorado has investigated them under the Consumer Protection Act.

(https://www.bbb.org/us/ma/cambridge/profile/travel-agency/ef-educational-tours-0021-1****)

We wish we had done this research before signing our son up. We would highly recommend no one sign their child up for any EF Educational Tours programs.

My sons class planned their France trip for 2 years from November23, he wanted to go as all his friends were so I enrolled him then in January the first payment was taken out. Things happen and none of his friends are going now so I called to cancel and have lost all my money then some, no refund AT ALL!

I can understand not getting back the $95 enrollment fee, but to not get back my payment of $270 plus be charged for travel insurance is ridiculous. As a single mom, this hurts. My advice to parents, please be 100% sure your kid is going before paying anything as they will not refund any amount and dont care at all. My daughter went 2 years ago under a different company and parents had no issues getting refunds.

This is a company that says they are all about education but they arent.. its all about money and they will take you for everything they can!!!

ALL PARENTS AND STUDENTS, PLEASE READ THIS FIRST.
I am sharing some of the key issues with this company, based on what I experienced first-hand and heard from close friends.EF tours company is a WORST company. Take a look into their google reviews before sending your children with them.

Their rating is 1.5 out of 5 https://www.yelp.com/biz/ef-educational-tours-cambridge-3Take a look at BBB and you will find thousands of complaints.They overcharge students / parents. Teachers and their families go free on students money. As a teacher, you bring 6 students, and you get 1 free ticket from EF Tours for you or your family member. So, you bring 24 students and teachers whole family of 4 can go on tour 100% free.They change the trip schedule anytime and you must pay extra money than what was committed initially.

If you plan to cancel, you will lose more than $1000Teenage students need to share small, cheap & filthy rooms with 4 other students and struggle for bathrooms, share beds, etc. These hotel rooms are comparable to US homeless shelters.I am sure your kids will bring home some bedbugs from those cheap hotels and lot of diseases.No lunches will be provided. Cheap breakfast and dinners from low-cost road-side places will be given to students.No vegetarian / vegan food options. So, they will surely struggle with hunger.

Kids with food allergies Pray God, as no one can save them.Tour guides know nothing about the respective cities. EF tours have a connection with local company, and they randomly send anyone they can find.The money parents pay for their child (to EF Tours) is good for the whole family to travel on their own. i.e. EF Tours trip cost is 3 to 4 times more expensive.Kids will spend a lot of time waiting for cheap transportation or hours in commute (below average buses) as EF tours book hotels that are cheap and far away.Bad customer service and you have to wait 2 hours to speak with someone.They have close to $1000 cancellation fees in case you plan to cancel.

Best thing is to STAY AWAY from this company.Your teen kids will surely miss the connecting flights and sleep in the airport floor and their customer service do not answer your calls. So, you will not know when they can take next flights. This is due to their cheap tickets, too less / high connection times. You will surely lose 2 days worth of time due to their cheap planning in flight connections.Absolutely no / bad medical support (if needed) which costs outrageous.They don't care about young kids!

All they care is money! No due diligence, just a BAD tour company to send your kids with.

Our son raised $2141 for a trip to Canada last spring and then EF Tours moved the dates of the trip to the summer - the same dates of our family vacation. He was bummed but we had no option but to ask for a refund.

They only refunded him $1447. They kept $694 (33%!) and stated it was for cancellation fees. How does a kid get charged cancellation on a trip that they moved on him? We attempted to discuss with them but they wouldnt consider his view.

Very disappointing and I cant believe a company has been able to get away with doing this so many times.

I had no idea until I started reading their reviews on various sites. Very sad that schools would consider using them.

Absolutely horrible

Absolutely horrible! We had a teacher schedule a trip to Costa Rica for July of 2024 with my daughter attending.

We signed up and began making payments. We are 8 months out from the trip so about zero planning has gone into affect by this company up to this point. The teacher, out of my control, decided to cancel the trip due to not enough interest. EF penalized me over $600 due to the cancelation.

I will never book with them again. Not a chance in *** Thanks for stealing $600 from my family. They did say I can roll that money into another trip. What trip, I just get to make one up and send my daughter with strangers?

I don't think so. I can understand a small 100$ fee or something similar but over $600 is robbery

The most inconsiderate and negligent company and people. All they care about is making money.

The reason why my daughter did not go on this school trip is that she needed a temporary visa to go through Canada. She did not get it on time due to governmental strikes in Canada. The EF Tours did not tell me that my daughter needed a visa at the very beginning of the process, they told me one month before the travel. I applied and there were a lot of delays with Canadian Airlines in June 2023.

The worst part for me is that I continuously asked EF Tours if there were any worst-case scenarios I needed to prepare for and they recklessly reassured me that there are no worst-case scenarios, hoping that the visa would come through. When they realized that this would not happen, which was one day before the travel, they told me that I had to pay for a two-way ticket for my daughter to fly directly to France (for which she did not need any visa). They did not try in any tiny way to solve this problem, like flying her with another group to Copenhagen.

They did nothing.

Their purpose is to suck money out of people's pockets, they are no educational company that cares about students. What has made me angrier is the fact that schools like Thomas Pyle in Bethesda associate themselves with this kind of blood-sucking company and still continue to use EF Tours, although it abuses and maltreats its students.