FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 23, 2019 Education First adds Israel to more of their tour lines Boston, MA (October 23, 2019)—As of November 1, Education First will expand their repertoire of tours to Israel for many of their additional programs including their language learning program. Education First has offered Israel tours to their GoAheadTours program for a while now. With this being said, they found a diverse cultural representation lacking in their other programs and understood that to mean that they needed to provide more countries to their catalogue, so they decided to add Israel to their other programs: EF Tours, EF Gap Year, EF College Study Tours and EF Ultimate Break. They provided tours to a majority of European countries; a healthy amount of Asian, South Pacific and Latin American countries and two African countries in their stock, but feeling to reach broader horizons still remained, especially in Isabella Thompson EF’s creative director. “It started to feel like we were creating the same type of tours for the past couple of years with a majority of our programs,” Thompson said. “We wanted to expand, and we know that there will always be something we need to learn.” Education First is not new to expansion. From their original headquarters in Sweden during 1965 to their American headquarter in Boston, MA in the past decade, they have not only expanded their reach tour-wise but also their list of languages they
provide. They have gone from their original English, French and German to developing programs for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. There is really only one culture, Jewish, that speaks Hebrew, and even then, it’s not spoken as fluently as one might have had wanted, Thompson said. If successful, this expansion will be the first of many that Education First considers under-represented in the programs the company offers at the moment. ### About Education First: Bertil Hult founded Education First in Sweden during 1965 when it was called Europeiska Feriekolan for Sweden students to learn English in the United Kingdom. They have gone from study abroad help to gap year planning since then. They have wanted to give students the option to learn via experience than just in the classroom because that belief has been something they have had since the beginning. Their motto is that they have always put education first.
October 23, 2019 Erin Florio, Senior Editor Condé Nast Traveller 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007, USA Hello Mrs. Florio, If you haven’t heard, EF Tours is expanding their traveling locations in all of their programs to include Israel. The fact of the matter is that EF realized that a majority of their tours were to very Christian and Euro-centric countries, so they asked themselves, “What can we do to learn more?” They’ve also realized that more and more high-school and college students want to learn about cultures that are not neatly tied to their own, and there is a big market for Israel to devout-Christians as well. The answer was simple. Add more knowledge on the Middle East and Africa in the fun, creative and educational way that EF is known for. EF believes that Condé Nast Traveller would be the perfect fit to run an article on this change because Condé Nast Traveller is a travel magazine that wants to report on news that has the ability to create an impact on the way the world thinks. Looking forward to hearing back from you. Sincerely, Rebecca Harville
Questions: 1. What made you look at Israel to be the first country to launch with these “more culturally diverse tours� as you put it? 2. Why was this the perfect time to launch this? Why not in the past? 3. How is this expansion different than a company that specializes in touring in Israel? 4. You said that this was a start to more countries that are under-represented. Which countries do you have in mind? 5. You said that the language learning program will be adding Hebrew because of it. How will you be implementing Hebrew into that program?