I am currently planning a trip (probably in about 18 months from now, May 2009). I practice a Korean martial art, and the school that I am a part of is planning a group trip there. Being that I am one of the higher ranking students in our school, I’ve been tasked with doing the initial planning for this trip. We’re going to try to go for about ten days. Should be a very awesome trip. I’ve always wanted to see a lot of the historical/cultural sites that we learn about through various ways of learning/practicing our martial art.
I think I’m going to need to contact a travel agent for this one. I went to the normal sites, Orbitz, Priceline, Cheaptickets, etc. for a price on tickets and the price per person was about $1200 just to fly there. We’re taking about a dozen people… and the price per person for 12 people was the same as it was if only one person was going… so I think we should be able to do better than that. I also need to do more research on what accommodations will cost and what we need to allot for transportation within the country and how much to factor in for admission prices (if any) to the places we wish to visit… as well as food prices. Sheesh… this is going to be a lot of planning… but I think it will be worth it in the end. We’re taking Grandmaster Choi, the head of the association we belong to (our school is just one of about a dozen schools in our association). Being that he is Korean, he should be able to help with a lot of the information (such as general costs), but he may not be up on flight costs and accommodations.
The other facet of planning this trip is raising money. I’m assuming we’re going to need somewhere between $2000-$3000 a person (almost half of the people going will be spouses of the students going… so we won’t need 12 hotel rooms… so that might help on cost, too… I just don’t have any idea what to expect on price at this point, to be honest). That’s a lot of money for many of the people who will be going. So we’re going to have some fund raising events to help lessen the load (hopefully by as much as half per person). I have several ideas to help with this. Being in a rural area, we have a lot of county fairs. We’re thinking of setting up a booth and selling Korean (more or less) food at the fairs and some of the other area events. We’re also thinking of doing some demonstrations and a few other things to raise interest and maybe get some donations. We may even want to set up a small non-profit to help pay for the trip (if the cost of doing so won’t offset the tax advantages we’d have for saving for the trip). There’s probably as much or more that I need to do in planning to pay for this trip as there will be in planning the trip itself…
Hopefully this will be doable and we can work it out. I think it would be an amazing experience.
