Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1. Tips for travellers
For starters, what do we mean by gap-year?
Well, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a gap-year is defined as:
'a period, typically an academic year, taken by a student as a break between school and
university or college education.'
Typically, yes, but we'd contend that a gap-year can be and is much more than that
nowadays. It's certainly not limited to school leavers. Nowadays people travel to volunteer,
work and study. You might be taking a year out from work, spending a redundancy pay-out
or enjoying your retirement.
Don't think your break would have to be for a year either - it could be as long and short as
you like, or can afford!
But the one thing all such trips have in common is the fact that they're all about taking time
out of the normal routine to do
something different, challenging, fulfilling, memorable
-
so that is our definition of a gap.
Who goes on a gap?
As we've just explained, anyone
can
. But who does?
It's difficult to give exact numbers because of the wildly different ways you can spend your
gap, but we're likely to be talking hundreds of thousands - that includes young people (teen-
agers and those in their early 20s), career breakers and retired people.
The Year Out Group, which represents 34 of the leading gap-year providers in the UK, ar-
ranged structured gap-year placements for just under 30,000 people in more than 90 coun-
tries in 2013 (the last full year of figures at time of going to press).
They say 75% of those gappers were aged between 18 and 24, predominantly taking time
between school and university or leaving university and taking up full-time work and about
20% were between 25 and 40, taking a sabbatical or career break or looking for a change of
career.
“There no longer is a typical age,” says Ellen Sziede at African Conservation Experience.
“There are still a lot of students joining us, but there are also more and more 'adult gappers',
active retirees, parent-and-teenager-teams. It's not uncommon at all to have volunteers in
their 20s, 40s and 60s mixing with teenage gap-year students at the projects, and it's all part
of the experience.”
