Jack, 

 

I've been on over 40 tours with boys choirs, and Pacific Boychoir currently does about 3 tours a year. We don't allow parents at all for various reasons, and our staff also has to do background checks. We often stay in hotels and the boys are in rooms of 4 with a room captain. We use a chaperone:chorister ratio of 1:6 or so for trips. Try to get the rooms together, or in clumps so one chaperone can be assigned to 2 rooms or so. The room captain gets one key, the chaperone another, door stays open at night until the chaperone closes it. No kids leave their room alone. Anybody who breaks the rules gets sent home. Strict, but necessary.

 

Just some ideas, let me know if you want/need more.

 

Kevin Fox

Artistic Director

Pacific Boychoir Academy

 Jack, I sent you a private message.  

Karen

I have used this company before:

They are a travel agency that deals specifically with school, church and college performing groups.  For hotel stays, the hire bonded security guards.  They also typically have one of their agents travel with the group specifically for dealing with the occasional issues that arise from traveling with a group.  They also manage details - down to meal stops (beats the heck out of crushing a McD's with your group) or the number of subway tokens required to get from your hotel to Carnegie.  Amazing attention to detail.

Hi, Jack.  Just a few random thoughts.

 

My late wife regularly took her Choristers (youth choir from church, age range 8 or 9 up through high school) on a season-ending overnight trip to Colonial Williamsburg ... an Evensong at Bruton Parish Church and a day at Bush Gardens theme park.  They tracked down either a scout camp, an FFA camp, or a similar camp with dormitory-type bunks and roughed it there.  Cheap, and easier to keep security.  Parents were chaperones, and families came in some cases with younger siblings.  With a church group, no problem with parents and no criminal background checks!

 

And re. meal stops:  with my college ensemble, we always made a point of stopping at corners where we knew in advance that there were at least 3 or 4 different and suitable restaurants, which not only spread the load among several places but allowed students choices.  In your case, you'd have to narrow it down to one restaurant per chaperone, but the idea is worth considering.  The timing of meal stops had to be set in advance, of course, and we always made a point of having snacks and soft drinks aboard the bus to cut down on time-consuming extra stops.  The bus driver and I were always last through the line (and the driver often got a comp meal), and when we were done it was time for everyone to get back on the bus.

 

John