The Challenge In Getting Traveling Volunteers Home Safe
Raleigh International works with young people to create positive change through community development projects worldwide. On 16 March 2020, because of the outbreak of COVID-19, the organisation decided to repatriate all its volunteers.
This meant Key Travel urgently needed to rearrange flights for two groups of passengers originally due to be on 10–12-week volunteer placements in Costa Rica, Nepal and Tanzania until April/May. This needed to be done in time before Nepal suspended international air travel on 22 March.
Our Solution In Getting Traveling Volunteers Home Safe
Working under intense time pressure, we successfully booked new flights for all 130 passengers. The Nepal group proved especially challenging because the three airlines we had booked with subsequently decided to cancel routes from Kathmandu, requiring us to re-book flights multiple times.
The Results In Getting Traveling Volunteers Home Safe
We made sure all passengers booked through Key Travel were safely home by 22 March. We were also pleased to help some passengers, who had not originally booked through us, on the last remaining international flights out of Kathmandu.
“Thank you so much for supporting the repatriation of Raleigh’s volunteers – in total, 130 volunteers returned to their home countries from three continents. The tight time scale along with regular flight cancellations and border closures makes this even more impressive!”
Andrew Luton, ICS Programme Manager, Raleigh International