Educational travel is a three-fold benefit for students who get to experience it.  As I wrote in an earlier blog, I view educational opportunities as a way to add "hooks" to your coat rack.  Educational travel provides one of those multi-prong hooks that helps students internalize new information, re-evaluate old information, and understand information coming from different cultural backgrounds.  Students who spend years in foreign language classrooms have the opportunity to experience authenticity which validates their learning.  They are able to use their language in context.  Being immersed in the language enhances the students' own aquisition from vocabulary to accent.  Educational travel is not limited to language learners.  Students of history, literature, art, and music can also benefit.  Reading about the history of a particular culture is fine but seeing it, walking through it, and touching it, is far better.  I have personally led several educational travel trips and I have never heard a student say "I wish I had stayed home".  I think that whatever your interest you can benefit by seeing how other people around the world are doing it.