Trip to Europe 'scam'

[semperfiona]

Last week we received a letter from People To People International offering Rosa a trip to Europe next summer. I hadn’t heard of the organization so I did a little poking about. First I looked at their website, and was somewhat concerned when I couldn’t find any indication of how much it would cost. So then I went to google, and the top “suggestion” in the google search window said “people to people scam”. Here’s the first page on that search...
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/people_to_people.html

According to the reviews, it’s a for-profit travel agency, it’s extremely expensive—with a lot of hidden after-the-fact charges--the lodgings and supervision are terrible, and there’s no actual selectiveness whatsoever. The names come from databases, and whoever pays first, goes. Most of the complaints are people who tried to get their money back for whatever reason, but several are people whose kids had bad experiences.

To be fair, I have seen several comments from people whose kids had a good experience, but the price is way too high for what you seem to get. As I said, their own website doesn’t say, but it looks like at least 4000 for two weeks in Europe. I think we could ALL go to Europe for two weeks for that.

Comments

[littleweeds]

My niece had to raise almost $5000 for a two week European tour with that company. Ouch.

[tryslora]

We've gotten two invitations from them, and in both cases, since they didn't come from the school, I said no to Chick. If it's not sponsored by someone I trust, I can't trust it myself, y'know?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah -- we've gotten several of those over the years as well. Some are quite fancy and tempting. Jerks...

Annie

[jilly-bear.livejournal.com]

We hosted two people to people kids back in the 80s - they were from Mexico and Arizona (we lived in Illinois at the time). They were great kids and we got free tickets to the show. I can't imagine why it would cost so much since they stay for free with host families.

[semperfiona]

Hm. I kind of got the impression from my searches that the organization had changed over time, and for the worse: that it had been a reputable international/intranational exchange program but was now more of an overpriced travel agency.

[jilly-bear.livejournal.com]

That's possibly - it was a long time ago (before any kids! so that would be more than 23 years ago) So a lot can change in that time.