They also build bridges—literally as well as figuratively.

Yonathan shared on our Facebook page his mission trip story of helping build a bridge for the Bribri people of Costa Rica. He wrote, “In the last few years, many mission teams have assisted with various significant work projects, but perhaps the most crucial was a suspension bridge in the remote village of Alto Coen, deep in the Costa Rican rainforest. An isolated community of about 130 people, Alto Coen is only accessible by an hour boat ride, a half hour bus ride, and a four hour hike.”

Yonathan shared that for years the isolated village dreamed of having a 100 meter suspension bridge. “The project had been a prolonged, complex process for the Bribri as they fought to find aid and funds to build this much-needed bridge. With the addition of a bridge, families would no longer be constrained by the powerful river that divided their village. The children from the far side of the river would be able to attend school regularly, and doctors would be able to reach the entire village to provide medical attention for the ill,” wrote Yonathan.

Their dream became a reality thanks in part to the efforts of American short term mission volunteers who labored for many days in hot summer heat. But the praise, said Yonathan, goes to the village’s people. “By far the ones who labored the longest and the hardest were the people of Alto Coen. It has been nearly nine years since they first began planning for the apparently impossible endeavor, yet they never gave up. They accomplished tasks by hand that most people would only consider undertaking with heavy equipment.”

How does Yonathan feel as he reflects on that mission trip?

“It is an uplifting feeling every time I return and see them eager to work and accomplish a new project that will empower their community. Continue to pray for the people of Alto Coen,” he said.

Helping those who empower others—that’s what we do each day here at Ministry Travel. We’re glad that we can play a part in helping people like Yonathan make such a difference in people’s lives. If you are planning a mission trip, we would love to provide you with discounted international airfare and excellent service from travel agents who really know missionary and humanitarian travel. Contact us at www.ministrytravel.com or by phone at 1-877-541-5726.

On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City issued an emergency message to U.S. citizens advising against all in-country travel until the weather improves and landslides are cleared. “The recent heavy rains mean that water saturation in the mountains is high and more landslides could occur,” said the advisory.

Honduras has issued a “state of red alert” according to the British Foreign Office. The situation there is similar to Guatemala with travel also disrupted by landslides and flooding. Reuters is reporting 81 people dead and thousands of people have abandoned their homes across Central America. In El Salvador, more than 13,000 people were forced to flee the rising waters. Humanitarian groups there are concerned about long-term food supplies as the floods have wiped out much of this season’s harvest.

What should you do if you are on a short term mission trip and your ministry team faces natural or other disasters? First, make sure that you get good information. That starts before you go by registering your team with the U.S. State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program at http://bit.ly/ptDdL9. This will enable the local U.S. embassy to get in touch with you in case of an emergency or advisory condition. Also, monitor local news and stay in touch with local authorities for information about road closings.

Second, don’t take chances. Roads in developing countries can be treacherous under normal conditions let alone during severe storms. Also, many of these nations do not have the resources to quickly respond to multiple emergencies and road closures. It often is better to extend your trip a couple days and allow for the situation to stabilize. If you do that, however, be sure to contact your Ministry Travel agent so that we can notify the airlines and work on re-booking you. Failure to do so may result in losing the entire value of your ticket.

Finally, look for ways to serve in the midst of the crisis. In the case of the Guatemalan medical team, a hospital near where they were stranded asked for their assistance. Flexibility is always important for these trips, especially when hit by unforeseen events such as severe weather.

App:

Trip Journal

What it does:

Let’s you journal your trip through video (on video equipped phones), pictures and writing; track your travel; and share everything through Facebook. It also exports to YouTube, Flickr, Google Earth and Picasa.

Why we like it:

The app has a beautiful interface and neatly organizes trips around waypoints. Once you have identified a waypoint you can shoot video, take pictures, make notes, or locate yourself on a map. Trip Journal tags these with the waypoint name which makes it easy to view your trip. You can jump back and forth between waypoints, media and your notes. When you later review your photos you know right where they were taken—no need to tag the photo as Trip Journal does that for you.

The app includes an interactive map and uses both GPS and cell tower triangulation to locate your position. It even provides your elevation. Trip Journal’s statistics feature shows the total distance traveled, elapsed time, high and low elevations, and average speed. The Facebook connectivity is excellent. With one tap of the screen it not only uploads all of your pictures and videos, but it also organize them with your notes and maps before placing the entire trip into a complete online journal.

How we use it on mission trips:

One of the biggest challenges on mission trips is keeping a journal. Every day is filled with interesting and exciting experiences and you want to capture as many of those experiences as you can. With the fast-paced nature of these trips, however, there is little time to sit down and write. Plus if you wait until the end of the day to journal, chances are you will forget a lot. With Travel Journal you can make notes on the fly quickly and easily with just a few taps on your cell phone.

We’ve used the app to find our coordinates at remote locations in Africa that are not on any maps. Once we got home we plugged those coordinates into Google Earth and had a nice visual for our post-trip presentations.

Cost:

Trip Journal is currently on sale for $0.99.

At Ministry Travel we are always looking for ways to not only help missionary travelers and humanitarians save on their international airfare, but also provide tips and resources to help them have more productive trips. When you need help with missionary travel arrangements we are just a phone call (1-877-541-5726) or mouse click away.

As we all know, Irene landed a real blow to the East Coast. But travelers also had to deal with Tropical Storm Maria in the Caribbean, Typhoon Talus impacting Japan and Hong Kong, Tropical Storm Lee in the Gulf Coast, Tropical Storm Nanmadol hitting Taiwan, and so on.

We often note in our updates that airlines have issued “travel waivers.” What this means is that airlines have relaxed their rules for cancelling or changing tickets if you are flying to or through cities affected by severe weather. We’ve noticed that since the storm-related travel fiascos of last year, airlines seem to be a little quicker to issue those waivers–which makes sense since they don’t want to deal with thousands of stranded passengers.

Note, however, that every airline’s “waiver” is different. Some will only allow you to postpone your flight for a couple days, some will let you fly early ahead of the storm, while others will let you cancel altogether without penalty. So always check the website of the particular airline that you are flying for their specific waiver details. And of course, keep watching our social media feeds for updates.

One article that we mentioned in our feeds this month was from the U.S. State Department on preparing for hurricane and typhoon season. They gave an 11 point “checklist” for travelers that bears mention here:

1. Enroll your trip with the State Dept., (travelregistration.state.gov)
2. Check with the airlines about travel services (the “waivers” that we mentioned earlier)
3. Carry an international cell phone that can be used to stay in touch with family in the States
4. Research the region so that you are familiar with local emergency procedures
5. Pack an emergency supply kit
6. Secure extra bottled water and non-perishable food
7. Know local emergency phone numbers as well as the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate
8. Have a water-proof container for your passport and other travel documents
9. Get travel insurance prior to your trip
10. Leave with family back in the States your detailed itinerary with local contact numbers
11. Keep with you a photocopy of your passport, driver’s license and any credit cards that you take, and leave a photocopy with someone in the States

At Ministry Travel, we not only care about saving you money on airfare for your missions and humanitarian trips, but we also want you to have a safe trip and effective ministry. So continue to watch our blog and social media sites for all the latest information and tools to help you as you help others.

Group Discounts

The London subway system offers discounts on unlimited day-use tickets for groups. The savings are significant, about a 75% discount off peak tickets. You can purchase tickets right outside of the arrivals hall of Heathrow’s Terminal 5. You will need to have one person pay on behalf of the group. The tickets provide unlimited travel at any time of the day within the zones that you pay for. Most likely you will want to get tickets for zones 1-6 as those include the airport and central tourist area.

The Original London Sightseeing Tour—the tour with the double-decker red buses–offers group discounts (www.theoriginaltour.com). To get the best discount, you need to purchase tickets online prior to your travel to London. The challenge with this, however, is that you have to buy tickets for a specific departure time, which is difficult to do when you don’t know if your fight will be on time or how long it will take to clear customs, etc.

A better alternative, although not quite as much of a discount, is to buy tickets as a group at the bus itself. Again, you will need one person to actually pay for the tickets, but the savings is worth it. The best place to start the tour is near the Piccadilly Underground Station, which is about a 45 minute subway ride from London Heathrow. The tour departs from the McDonald’s about two blocks from the station. This is also a great area to eat as there are several fast-food restaurants there.

Luggage

For eight British Pounds you can securely store your carry-on bag at the Left Luggage center near the rail station entrance at Heathrow airport. It is well worth the money to not have to lug your bag all over London.

Change for Restrooms

Some restrooms charge to use the facilities, so be sure to have some British coins with you as you tour the city.

Hopefully these tips will help your international missions team the next time you find yourself traveling through London. As a reminder, Ministry Travel offers discounted airfare for missionaries and humanitarian teams on most major carriers to just about every place in the world. Contact us today at 1-877-541-5726 or www.ministrytravel.com for a no-obligation quote and see how much money we can save your missions trip.

Before long, Lori, Larry and Karen, along with the rest of their team members, were back home in the U.S. and back to their “normal” lives. Although they had only been gone two weeks, it seemed like a lifetime of experiences. As they went about their tasks, their minds wandered back to the dusty African roads and the faces of so many people who they had touched while serving abroad. The trip’s excitement had turned to sadness. “Will we ever have that kind of experience again,” they wondered.

Mission trips are a life-changing experience. Usually team leaders do a great job preparing the team to go, but they don’t always do such a good job of getting them ready to come home. It’s not uncommon to have some post-mission trip blues. If that describes you, then here are some ideas to help you transition out of them.

Embrace reality. Very few people actually get to live on top of a mountain! It is great to visit, but the experience doesn’t last forever. We need to celebrate our experiences but not live in the past. We should focus on being thankful that we got to go and be determined to incorporate lessons from that experience into our everyday lives.

Focus on serving those around you. Know that many people find themselves in some kind of a valley right after a mountain top experience. When that happens, the key is to turn our focus off from ourselves and onto others.

When I return home from a mission trip, I often think of the Old Testament prophet Elijah and his literal mountain top experience at Carmel. There he humiliated hundreds of false prophets in dramatic fashion. But where do we find Elijah right after that incident? He’s down in a valley—a desert actually—under a tree asking God to take his life. The story is told in 1 Kings 19, where we see that Elijah had become very self-focused. “I’m the only faithful one left,” he said, “I’m the one who has been zealous for the Lord.”

God told him that he in fact was not the only one. There were 7,000 others who had stayed faithful. Then God gave him a job—mentoring a young prophet by the name of Elisha—and that task changed Elijah’s outlook. In the same way, when you come off a spiritual mountain top, ask yourself how to use your experience to help someone else. Is there someone who you can mentor? Try making ministry a lifestyle not just a two week experience. It’s a lot easier when you go from one ministry abroad right into another ministry at home.

In addition to these ideas, the travel guide Lonely Planet recently had on its website some suggestions for those suffering from post-travel blues: dream big, start a piggy bank, share your passion, and make art. While the article focused on vacation travelers, we can adapt it to missions travel as well.

Dream big! “Turn your post-holiday depression into pre-holiday anticipation,” says Lonely Planet. For our purposes, we would say that it’s okay to begin dreaming about your next mission trip. Just like Larry and Karen were contemplating a return as their Africa trip wound down, you can begin thinking and planning for your next outreach.

Start a piggy bank. Begin saving now for your next trip. Even if you have family and friends who help support your endeavors, you should still try to do everything you can to be ready financially. In doing so, you may find yourself asking the same question that a Lonely Planet blogger asked herself. “I have to ask if getting so caught up in the possessing of stuff distracts us from what’s really important in life?”

The blogger, who only goes by the name “Steph,” felt that she had too many “things” and that the cost of owning all of those things was stifling her ability to do what she really wanted to do. So she started selling her excess stuff to use the proceeds for what she considered important. While her focus was not on mission trips, her thinking certainly does apply to those who have a desire to serve internationally. Maybe eBay, Craigslist or a good old fashioned garage sale is the way to get that piggy bank started and get you on the road to your next mission trip.

Find a community of people who share your passion. You may want to organize on-going fellowships with others who went on your trip, or participate in conferences dealing with the region of the world where you worked. You can also find similar interests groups online through Facebook or by following people on Twitter who minister in your focus country. In addition, you can stay abreast of developments in the area by following humanitarian news feeds from services like www.Alertnet.org.

Make art. “Instead of boring your friends with your travel stories, do something creative with your memories,” says Lonely Planet. “Make photo books and playlists, turn your journal scribbles into travel writing.” They also suggest spicing up the old fashioned slide show with music and snacks that match the destination.

The mountain top experience of a mission trip is a good thing. Celebrate it! Enjoy the moment, but be ready to re-enter your world. Jump into ministry and look forward to impacting more lives in the future. You mission trip can be the beginning of a lifestyle of service and global focus that will quickly drive away any post-trip blues.

_____________________________________________

Frank Banfill is president of MaxPoint Ministries (www.maxpoint.org) and recently launched ManageMyMissionTrip.com to provide administrative support to those who lead short term missions. He writes on behalf of Ministry Travel (www.ministrytravel.com) the leading provider of discounted airfare for missionaries.

What do you think?

We got to discussing flights for missionaries, and I asked him who handles his missionary airfare arrangements. “Oh, I just find an Internet site and book it myself,” he replied.

“Are you aware that there are discounts available for international missionary and humanitarian travel,” I asked. You should have seen the look on his face when he realized that for years now he had needlessly been paying full airfare for his international mission trips.

“I had no idea,” he replied.

Before leaving, he thanked my several times for giving him the tip. This veteran global traveler is like many others who have bought into myths about booking missionary airfare. Their assumptions and lack of information are costing them not only money but also time and other resources. Here are three myths that I hear frequently as I interact with missionaries and mission trip leaders.

Myth #1: It doesn’t matter where you buy your airline ticket; the prices are all the same.

Between the proliferation of Internet travel sites and aggressive airline advertising campaigns aimed at driving you to their websites, it would seem that the simplest thing is to just book missionary travel online yourself. Or if you know a guy who has a friend who works at a travel agency across town, why not just call there? Does it really make a difference?

Early in my 20+ years of international ministry travel I discovered that airfare can vary greatly and that who you buy from really does make a difference. I discovered that the “secret” to getting discounted fares is knowing the difference between published fares—what you get from airlines and the Internet sites—and contract fares offered by select travel agencies.

I learned this as a young pastor taking a group from my church to serve for a week in Germany. I called the local office of a travel agency “chain” and was given one price on a particular airline, which was the same as what the airline gave me. I contacted another travel agency that I had heard about and got the same flights on the same airline for a couple hundred dollars less per person. The difference was that the second travel agency had contract fares, which are special arrangements with the airlines to sell a certain number of seats at a discounted price.

Today, most major airlines offer missionary or humanitarian contract rates for sale through a select few travel agencies. By utilizing these rates, it is not uncommon to save several hundred dollars off from each ticket. Africa is especially discounted, but savings are available to other continents as well. So it pays to know who to contact, because you can’t get these discounts from just any travel agent or even from the airlines.

Myth #2: You get the same service (or lack of it) regardless of where you book.

Although we live in a business culture that talks much about customer service, most of us who fly regularly don’t see a lot of that when dealing with airlines. Sometimes it feels like you have been dropped onto a deserted island and left to fend for yourself. When you call an airline, their job is to get your issue resolved as fast as possible so that they can tackle the 10 calls queued up behind you.

A good missionary travel consultant will explore a variety of options that not only help the bottom line, but actually make travel easier. There has been many times where my travel counselor came up with better schedules, found innovative ways to save money or suggested ways to avoid a “forced” overnight stay in a city.

Internet sites, of course, don’t provide personal interactions and there are no experts to review the travel arrangements with you. There’s no one to help catch mistakes that you might make. I know a short term mission team leader who typed in the wrong travel dates while booking online an entire team’s international flights. He didn’t realize it until hours after he had hit the “submit” button and purchased the tickets. His mistake was difficult to fix and cost him many hours and a lot of money!

Myth #3: If there is a problem, the airline will take care of me.

Who would have ever imagined that a volcano with an unpronounceable name way up in Iceland would spew ash all over Europe and shut down air travel for days on end? Yet that is exactly what we saw last year. This year, a volcano in Chile is wreaking havoc in the skies over Australia. You never think about flight attendants, pilots, air traffic controllers or even passport control officers walking off the job and airline schedules being sent into disarray, but we have seen all of this in recent days. Then there are the frequent problems like mechanical malfunctions and weather delays that can leave you grounded. You need someone on your side who will look out for your and explore all options, and you just don’t get that from the airlines.

Having traveled to 26 countries across six continents myself, and managed teams working in dozens of additional countries, I have seen international travel counselors come to our rescue on many occasions. If you are stuck in the middle of Timbuktu, it is nice to know there is someone you can call on who can get you out!

With airfare accounting for half or more of most short term mission trip expenses, and knowing that a bad travel experience can really dampen an otherwise great trip, I’ve found that it is best to leave air arrangements to people who know what they are doing. While missionary travel specialists can’t control volcanoes or airline strikes, they sure can come to the rescue when those or a hundred other things happen. That’s good news for all of us who travel abroad to serve.

_______________________________________________

Frank Banfill is president of MaxPoint Ministries (www.maxpoint.org). He regularly leads short term mission teams and assists other ministries with their international outreaches. He writes on behalf of Ministry Travel (www.ministrytravel.com).

With one tap on the screen, you can get all of the latest travel warnings and alerts as well as details on all the countries in the world that the State Department follows (which is pretty much all of them). The country specific section is divided into three parts: Know Before You Go, Country Background, and US Embassies/Consulates. Know Before You Go includes alerts/warnings specific to that country, maps, entry/exit requirements, safety and security tips and much more. Country background provides the State Department’s briefings on a country including history, government, economy, etc. The embassies/consulates section provides addresses, hours of operations, emails, websites and maps for the American embassy and consulate(s) in the selected country.

The app also gives you access to the Smart Traveler Enrollment program where you can register your trips and travel contact information with the State Department in case of an emergency. The app will keep track of your itineraries and includes a place to keep notes.

You can view the State Department’s Twitter and Facebook feeds on your phone, which is great for late-breaking news and issues.

While the look, feel and functionality of the app is great, there is one big drawback—most of the information is not native to the software on the phone. That means that you have to have an Internet connection (either Wi-Fi or through a cellular data network) for it to work. Not a problem if you’re sitting at home, but if you are in the middle of the Serengeti and need the information, you may have trouble (although the Serengeti actually has good cell phone coverage—it just will cost you a lot to access it!).

The app is free and even with that one big drawback, it is a must-have for any iPhone user who travels internationally or who just wants to learn about different countries. It is definitely easier to navigate than the State Department’s full version website. The app is available for download through Apple’s iTunes store.

Or, maybe a mission during the fall or winter? It won’t be peak season and your fares will be much less. Give us a call at 877-541-5726 or click http://www.ministrytravel.com/contact/quote-request.shtml and our travel consultants will get you the best fares available in the industry for your missionary tickets.