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So you want to travel abroad…

But you’ve never left your timezone. Or maybe that $1500 roundtrip flight you just searched for is forcing you to exit the page. Or you’re the person who has no idea how to start planning a trip and you don’t have the time to figure it out.

So you do some Googling and you find these awesome blog posts about people who book one-way tickets, quit their jobs and travel for a living, or manage to travel to Europe for only $100 a day.

But this doesn’t seem at all realistic for your lifestyle right now. For those who are new to traveling abroad or afraid of all the planning themselves, traveling with a tour agency is an often overlooked option by bloggers. There are so many people on the internet who plan these amazing trips and do them at low costs. Which is awesome. Props to you! But such trips require a lot of planning, travel hacking, and experience.

Thanks to tour agencies like EF, or Education First, traveling hassle-free as a young adult IS POSSIBLE!!

In this post, we’re going to share all the details about traveling with a premier travel agency that has the young adult life in mind. EF Ultimate Break offers young adults with an affordable and easy way to travel. Let’s get into it!

Why We Travel with EF Ultimate Break

The Honest Truth About Traveling with EF

For almost all our international travels, we have traveled with the tour agency EF, or Education First. We traveled with EF College Study for our first trip abroad, which made trip planning and the trip itself easier to manage compared to doing everything on our own. We had never traveled out of the country before, aside from a high school-sponsored trip to Mexico, so planning a trip to Europe on our own was out of reach and scary for us. We wanted planning to be effortless and easy! When the opportunity arose with our college to travel to Italy with EF College Study, we decided to take the plunge and book with EF!

EF Education First has Many Options for Travel

EF is a large tour agency with headquarters and subdivisions all over the world. We have traveled with two of their brands: EF Ultimate Break and EF College Study Tours.  Each subbrand of EF offers travel experiences to different age groups and for different purposes.

EF Ultimate Break is the Perfect Way to Travel for Young Adults

When traveling with EF Ultimate Break anyone from 18-28 can simply sign up online with a down payment of only $150. EF Ultimate Break offers exactly what you think it does, ultimate trips! These tours are hosted throughout the year, all around the world, and on a young adult’s budget! When browsing the website, you can search by length of trip, country, and cost! Each tour page includes the activities and general itineraries for each day. And you can price out your trip based on wherever you’ll be flying out of!

A reputable tour agency like EF provides a sense of comfort for travelers while being an affordable option, especially for young people. We know it can be hard to find time and funds for travel, and EF makes it easy and affordable!

Read more about how we selected our EF Ultimate Break trips here!

EF College Study Tours

EF College Study Tours is another branch of EF and offers colleges the opportunity to arrange short-term study abroad trips with their students. For these trips, a professor or academic representative must coordinate student sign-ups. Then, they can recruit students to attend! If you’re a college student, see if your school offers College Study Tours with EF. This is how we traveled with EF while we were in college! These trips were just as fun as our trip with EF Ultimate Break, and they offer all the same perks including cost and location!

EF Gap Year

EF Gap Year is designed for those who want to travel during a “gap year”  either through language exchange, volunteering, or internships. These experiences allow you to build skills and explore the world at the same time! For these programs, there is an application process. Gap year trips are offered in locations around the globe as well!

EF Educational Tours

EF Educational Tours allow teachers and a variety of educators to travel the world with their students. Tours can be focused on educational topics, language immersion, service learning, and leadership studies.

Explore America

While most EF trips offer international travel, Explore America is completely based in the United States and territories and Canada. Visit national parks and cities from New York to San Fransisco, attend themed tours based on STEM, art, and service-learning, and even visit colleges.

Go Ahead

Most EF programs are focused on college-aged adults, but Go Ahead welcomes young-at-heart attendees the opportunity to travel the world. These trips pride themselves on hosting smaller groups for immersive travel experiences across 7 continents.

What’s Really Included in an EF Ulitmate Break Trip

When you book a trip with EF Ultimate Break, a full-time tour director, accommodations, flights, ground transportation, guided tours, and excursions are already planned and included in your cost. The tour directors are extremely knowledgeable, fluent in multiple languages, and go above and beyond to make your trip memorable. You also receive group benefits such as skipping lines at busy attractions.

Before leaving for your trip, you can be added to your trip’s Facebook group, where you can communicate with other travelers and your tour director. Here, you can think about what you want to do in your free time and get advice from others going on the trip about packing and preparing! This was a really nice perk for us! Another perk about traveling with EF Ultimate Break is that if anything goes wrong on the trip, in terms of flights, accommodations, or tours, EF takes care of the problem for you.

When traveling with EF, don’t worry about traveling alone. Many of the people who attend EF trips are either traveling alone, which makes it a good environment for meeting new people in your tour group.

EF trips are great for people who don’t want to plan an international trip on their own, for those who are new to traveling, or for people traveling solo. For the longer trips where you visit many destinations in a short amount of time, you get a taste of each place! For us, we now want to go back to all of the places we visited!

Read more about our 30 days in Europe here!

EF Ultimate Break Cost Breakdown: What’s All Included in the Price

When you first search for the price, you might think the cost is expensive. But if you think about how expensive flights, group transportation, and accommodations can be, the cost is very reasonable for a college-aged budget. (Remember that $1500 flight?) Do some searching on your own, and you’ll see costs adding up and the benefits of EF Ultimate Break’s prices looking nicer and nicer. And the full cost isn’t due upfront, you can pay in monthly installments! EF Ultimate Break prices are made incredibly reasonable for a young person. One of the nicest parts if that EF offers promo codes and discounts throughout the year. They have Black Friday, semi-annual, year-end, and first-time traveler discounts!

The Honest Truth About Traveling with EF Ultimate Break and EF College Study

We have traveled with both EF Ultimate Break and College Study and have thoroughly enjoyed ALL of our experiences. Most importantly, on all our trips, we felt very safe traveling with EF. Some tour agencies aren’t like EF in terms of safety. They offer travel insurance and a 24/7 emergency call line. And our tour director was there for us 24/7, which made us feel very comfortable.

The trips were extremely well planned, organized, and include the highlights of the destinations without being overbooked. The itineraries are an excellent balance of free time and planned activities, giving you the opportunity to explore what you want while you are abroad. For us, we loved having an itinerary where we could personalize our free time. Going on our trips, we knew that we would get to experience exactly what we wanted and more!

Traveling with EF was a relaxed experience because all of the stress of planning, booking, and logistics were taken off of our shoulders. We barely had to do anything in terms of preparation aside from paying the monthly bill and picking what to do in free time. Anytime something didn’t go according to plan on a trip, the tour director handled it.

We have loved our experiences will EF and plan to book our future trips with them. Traveling as college students with EF Ultimate and College Break helped us to see parts of the world that we never thought we would be able to visit.

Read more about how we selected our EF Ultimate Break trips here!

Who’s Ready to Book with EF Ultimate Break?

A Cultural Experience

Some people might critique tour agencies for not giving people, young people especially, an immersive, cultural experience. EF is an agency that promotes providing travelers with an experience, not just a vacation, so they can become global citizens. EF books activities that are immersive, culturally appropriate, and exciting for their travelers. The tour directors encourage exploring and trying new things like food, riding the public transit, and speaking the language! By booking with EF Ultimate Break, you’re signing up for an awesome cultural experience!

Book With EF Ultimate Break

Now that you know EF Ultimate Break is legit. Let’s get to booking!

Booking with EF Ultimate Break is so easy; put $150 down and your summer plans are locked in! Read more about the booking process here!

To end this post, we’ll leave you with a little photo dump of some of our favorite EF Ultimate Break memories! You don’t want to miss out on the trip of a lifetime!

Like this review of EF Ultimate Break? Share with your friends!