Group Field Trips
Perhaps the most common type of field trips is the ones organized by faculty members and arranged ahead of time. They tend to be well integrated into the course, and there is time in the semester to help prepare students to take maximum advantage of the visit and the professionals at the site to organize materials and the facility for the students. You have the chance to encourage—or require—students to develop questions of the speakers at the visit. These field trips also offer a more efficient way to incorporate field trips into a course since you accompany the students, notice what they observe, and can include information about the experience in class discussions or tests. Your experience makes evaluating their field-trip reports easier. In addition, these visits also solve the difficulty of liability since the entire group travels together in a bus or van, which enables you to ensure that everyone arrives at the same time.

However, even the best group field trip can go astray. Sometimes, the persons who are providing the tour or explaining the operation are not as well prepared as they promised and their talk does not recognize the information that students already possess. I have taken students on field trips and, even with plenty of discussion ahead of time, found the professionals on site encouraging students to enter the field of hospitality even though they were juniors in a bachelor of science in hotel and travel management. Or I have found speakers show up and say, “I am not sure why I am here, but I am glad to answer any questions,” even though there was plenty of preparation ahead of time. In addition, sometimes these professionals provide useful information, but not what you expected. Being there enables you to tailor your next class lecture, discussion or assignment to incorporate some of the missing information. Being part of a field trip that did not turn out as expected can help you lead a discussion that evaluates the visit, as well.

Individual Field Trips
The most productive learning experiences often involve individual field trips or site visits, organized as part of a course. Restaurant or hotel reviews; visits to hotels, travel or other trade shows; and individually attending gourmet-food shows and meetings of organizations off campus are all examples of individual field trips. The advantage of offering students this option is the freedom they are given to decide what to visit, when to visit it and how to make the visit successful. It also does not take class time or scheduling on your part since the site visit is the student’s responsibility.

The best advantage of individual field trips is the range of learning that students acquire and the thinking and planning experience on their part. Although it takes some careful planning of the assignment to ensure that students use this experience productively, I have found that they often pick sites to visit or restaurants to review that I would not have considered, and the insights they acquired—both from planning the visit and making the visit—can be very insightful and far reaching. Even when they are charged to visit five booths of their own choice at a trade show, they tend to pick interesting ones and often visit a lot more in order to find five worth writing about.

Incorporating individual site visits into class discussion can be more challenging since there is no common experience; it takes recognizing and finding the differences and similarities of the various visits. The discussion, however, is often more fascinating to everyone, and it adds depth to the conversation. It also gives students a chance to shine in discussing their individual visits and comparing them to what they hear about other visits. The option of enabling them to choose locations brings a wider range of sites into the course discussions.

One way to ensure that the visits are all worthwhile is to provide an approved list of sites or to be explicit in the criteria that students need to use in selecting a site to visit. Or you can require them to select a site and have it approved by you before they visit. In this way, you focus on the planning part as separate from the visiting and reporting part.

Planned Field Trips

When you have organized a field trip and included it in the syllabus, you provide students with the chance to plan for the visit, rearrange other obligations that might interfere with the visit and prepare ahead for the visit. These steps often ensure a more successful visit. Planning ahead also gives you plenty of time to communicate with the site, share the syllabus of the course, discuss the ideas that you have covered or will cover before the site visit, and help the speakers at the site prepare for what they will share. At its best, this model contributes a lot to providing students with industry experience.

Serendipitous Field Trips
Sometimes, however, field-trip possibilities arise due to changes in schedules, new connections that you or your program have made with a hotel, restaurant, catering facility, banquet hall or other company, and there is not much time to plan. These experiences, often spur of the moment, can provide exciting learning experiences since most of the learning comes after the experience due to the lack of time for explicit planning. Visiting a restaurant with my Customer Relationship Management class on the basis of one week’s notice provided a wide range of insights for students and the restaurant staff, as well. It also led to lots of opportunities to integrate the experience into future classes. So, if you have these opportunities, use them.

Summary
Thank you for reading this column on types of field trips. Next month we will discuss note-taking in field trips and site visits. If you have comments about this topic or suggestions for others, send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will include them in future Mayo’s Clinics.

Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, is a clinical professor at New York University and a frequent presenter at CAFÉ events nationwide.