The best student travel companies, compared.

ACIS was founded in Boston in 1978 by Peter Jones, an ALSG Tour Manager who had worked under Passports' founder — which is why an ACIS itinerary looks more like a Passports itinerary than anything else on this page: same city-center hotel tier, same caliber of tour managers, same respect for the educational arc. Today ACIS is owned by AIFS, the American Institute For Foreign Study, a multi-brand parent that also runs AIFS Abroad, Au Pair in America, and Camp America.

The programs are unapologetically premium — expertly built European itineraries, strong teacher loyalty, and award-winning customer service (a 2014 Silver Stevie for Customer Service Department of the Year). The quality shows up in the reviews: 4.7 on Trustpilot with roughly 92% of reviews at 4 or 5 stars — the only operator here in Passports' review tier.

It is also, typically, the most expensive way to run the trip. The premium sticker comes with published add-ons on top: a $100 adult fee plus $75–$150 per night starting at age 21, and travel protection at $40–$55 per traveler per day. Passports includes those in the base price. Our line-by-line verdict: same trip, smaller invoice.

EF is the giant. Bertil Hult founded it in a Lund University dorm basement in 1965 — the same year ALSG started in Worcester — selling English-immersion trips to Brighton for Swedish students. Six decades later, EF is one of the largest private education companies in the world, still family-held, with hubs in Zurich, London, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. EF Educational Tours is its American student-tour arm and the biggest name in international student travel.

Scale is the product. Volume keeps the brochure price low, and for many teachers EF is the first quote they see. The contract is where the price moves: a $200-plus-$90-per-night adult supplement, travel protection sold in $190–$590 tiers, Tour Director gratuities collected separately on tour, and hotels that — per EF's own accommodations page — “may be located outside the city center.”

Reviews at EF's volume are genuinely mixed: 4.5 on Trustpilot, with about 1 in 6 reviews at 3 stars or below. None of that makes EF the wrong choice for a budget-first group — it makes the all-in math the thing to check. Our verdict page says it in one line: EF wins the brochure; Passports wins the trip.

WorldStrides began in 1967 as Lakeland Tours — founded by an Illinois middle-school teacher who figured he could run his students' Washington, D.C. trip better than the operator he'd hired — and moved to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1979. It grew into the largest student-travel organization in the country, first on domestic capital-city programs, then internationally through a decade of acquisitions: Explorica, NETC, ISA, Envision, BrightSpark, Casterbridge, Oxbridge.

Since December 2017 it has been majority-owned by the French private-equity firm Eurazeo, with Primavera Capital as minority partner; it filed for Chapter 11 in July 2020 and emerged that October — the first travel company through pandemic-era bankruptcy. Contracts run organization-sponsored by default, which puts the school itself in a contractual role most teachers don't expect, and the legal entity on the paperwork is Lakeland Tours LLC dba WorldStrides.

Quality is the hardest to generalize on this page. A “WorldStrides trip” might be operated by any of several acquired brands, and the experience tracks the brand and the itinerary more than the logo: 4.3 on Trustpilot, with about 1 in 5 reviews at 3 stars or below. Domestic D.C. programs are its home turf. For international tours, ask which sub-brand actually operates yours — and read that contract.

Explorica was founded in Boston in 2000 by former EF executives — including EF's former president — with a plan the courts later made famous: undercut EF's prices. (The early rivalry produced a landmark web-scraping lawsuit, EF v. Explorica, in 2001.) WorldStrides acquired the brand in 2016.

The model is budget. Hotels are “two to three star (European standards)” within 45 minutes of a major tourist attraction, per its own hotel-quality page; the contract adds a $125 adult supplement, a $45-per-night double-room surcharge, percentage-priced Trip Mate protection, and $6–$8-per-day Tour Director tips collected in cash on tour.

It's the cheapest sticker on this page and the weakest review profile — 3.8 on Trustpilot, with roughly 1 in 3 reviews at 3 stars or below. And the brand itself is being wound down: Explorica's own homepage now redirects 2027–28 school-year departures to WorldStrides. Booking Explorica in 2026 is booking WorldStrides with an older brochure.