J. Michael Donovan President

'There are some very specific reasons why Visit Canada has become America's leading operator of educational tours to Canada. Things like this never happen by accident.'

First and foremost, we are a group of serious professionals, deeply and uniformly committed to the creation of the finest quality educational field trip programs anywhere.

We are sharply focused on school field trip programs. It's all we do, and all we've ever done, all day, every day, since 1986.

We know schools, we know teachers and, most importantly, we know kids. We know what tires and bores them, we know what interests and excites them; we know what they'll eat and what they won't. And, as well as anybody, we know how to manage them when they're away from home on a field trip.

Our groups are accommodated in first-class or deluxe hotels that have been inspected and periodically reinspected by senior management. They're selected on the basis of safety, security and cleanliness. We never use marginal hotels for our kids that wouldn't be perfectly appropriate for adults. Moreover, we contract with the hotels to provide overnight security in the hallways to keep members the group in their rooms after curfews and nonmembers out.

We personally check virtually every menu item in every restaurant to make sure that every group's experience is positive, educational and memorable.

Our tour itineraries are meticulously crafted to ensure that students get the absolute maximum from their limited time in Montreal or Quebec City. We won't waste your kids' time swimming in a hotel swimming pool, or dancing in a hotel meeting room, or anything else that they could just as easily do at home. If there are better tour itineraries anywhere, we've never seen them.

Moreover, we don't contract for guides that we've never met. We know virtually all of our guides personally. They've been carefully screened and hired for their ability to communicate with children; they're trained and retrained, continuously evaluated and re-evaluated. Several of our guides have been with us for more than 15 years.

Finally, we are parents of field-trip-aged kids ourselves, and we want you to know that we care about yours.

For many younger students, our trips are a first overnight experience away from home and parents. This expression of confidence can impart a measure of maturity, independence and worldliness in many kids. Parents and teachers see the difference when the trips are over.

In short, we think that students probably learn more during a three or four day field trip than in any other three or four days of the school year. And for most students, the lessons learned stay with them for a lifetime.