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“It began with my head in the clouds when I was 30,000 feet above the Atlantic,” Jen Durkin said. “Over a decade ago, I was a student on a shoestring, struggling to afford and navigate an educational travel experience abroad.”
Durkin had attempted to embark upon a study-abroad trip through her school, but she grew discouraged in the face of confusing bureaucracy and dwindling funds, eventually eschewing the program. Still determined to explore, she decided to take matters into her own hands and arranged a brief trip to Portugal.
"It wasn't enough to satisfy my wanderlust, but it did spark a thought on the long plane ride home."
That thought would culminate in Project Travel, a Boulder startup that facilitates educational travel for students, instructors, and administrators. The organization’s mission, Durkin said, is to simplify the process of educational travel by improving communication between students and educators.
Though it originated in 2012 as a fundraising platform for traveling students, Project Travel now strives to mitigate additional problems with educational travel – namely, efficiency and transparency of communication between students and educators. To that end, the startup has developed Via, a software tool designed to provide an uncomplicated means for universities and program providers to find and interact with prospective participants.
Scheduled for launch in spring 2015, Via was developed to fill what Durkin describes as an “information gap” and a “technology gap.” With Via, she explained, educators can efficiently and thoroughly detect interest, process applications, and handle student inquiries (information), as well as manage programs and students using a digital platform (technology). Durkin hopes a consolidated digital system, rather than a paper-based series of procedures, will dramatically improve educators’ ability to manage large quantities of information.
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“Imagine this is the first time you’re considering [leaving the country]. You know what your goal is but not what getting there entails. So, you rely on your advisors to provide the information, which has been compiled in very dense piles of paper and static websites…[Instead] Via allows program providers to digitally collect interest in 15 seconds, and interested travelers are able to start the information process on their own time. When advisors reach out, they can have more personalized conversations. So far we've seen more than 50 percent of our interested travelers answer over 30 questions in less than 10 minutes,” Durkin said.
Via offers several additional benefits for students, Durkin said, starting with the application process and program matching. “Via maps out the process. By organizing the sequence and controlling the visibility of what's next, we minimize the frustrations that participants feel and help advisors easily track the individual and group progress.”
The seven-person startup has raised $725,000, a portion of which was received at Coolhouse Labs, an accelerator program in Michigan. Project Travel has partnered with three beta-testing organizations: a public research institution in Michigan, a study-abroad program provider in Boston, and a private liberal arts college in Kentucky.
According to Durkin, “80% of students believe that they will travel in college, yet only about 3% do.” But, as more organizations show interest (the current count is approaching 100), she hopes these statistics will start to shift. “The only way we can make a difference is to remove the excuses and create a movement where travel is no longer a luxury, but an expectation.”
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