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A Corporate Social Responsibility Trip in Istanbul

Your team spends the morning inside an Istanbul school we have been visiting since 2011.

Send the Dates and the Headcount
Read the School Story

A Relationship Older Than Most CSR Policies

Anyone can collect money at an offsite. The part that needs an operator is everything else: a school that knows and trusts the visitor, permission settled with an administration rather than at the gate, a licensed guide who can carry a conversation in both languages, and transport that arrives inside a school timetable.

We have run tours in the neighbourhoods these schools sit in since 2011, and guest bookings have funded the visits from the start. When your team walks in, it walks in as the guest of that relationship, and it joins a day the school was already having. The history, with photographs, is at School Visits in Istanbul, and the instruments end up at the music school.

Children in an Istanbul street, photographed on an early school visit

I have watched CEOs sit on a classroom floor and lose an argument about football to a nine year old. That morning does more for a team than any rope course, because it is real. The school gets the support, and your people get the city.

Fethi Karataş, founder and lead guide

What Your People Team Has to Sign Off

Six answers for whoever owns the risk on this trip.

Arranged with the school, not at the gate

The visit is agreed with the administration in advance, runs during school hours, and the teachers stay in charge of their own classroom.

Your team is briefed before it walks in

The school’s rules reach your people at the briefing, so nobody has to be corrected in front of a class.

Photography follows the school’s consent rules

What may be photographed is agreed with the administration beforehand, faces are avoided unless the school clears them, and where a school says no, your team hears that before arrival.

A licensed operator carries the day

A licensed guide leads the visit and a named coordinator owns it end to end. The contracting company is BEFORE TRAVEL, licensed and insured, invoicing against a PO number where your process needs one.

Term time, and an honest version outside it

School visits run from about mid September to mid June. In the school holidays the morning is built around the music school and the neighbourhood instead, and you are told which one you are getting before you book.

What the booking funded

Instruments for the music schools, classroom materials for the public schools, and whatever the teachers said they needed that year. Your team hears that account on the day.

Three Shapes a Day Takes

Name the one that fits your week, and what comes back is written around it.

A half day

For an offsite whose agenda is already full. The school morning and nothing else, and your team is back at the hotel or the venue by early afternoon.

A full day

For a people team that wants the whole day to mean the same thing. School in the morning, the neighbourhood on foot, lunch, then the water or the old city.

A block inside your own event

For congress and offsite organisers. The morning runs inside a programme somebody else owns, and your people are handed back on schedule.

Teams that come back visit the same school, and the second visit is a different thing: the children remember names, and so do your people. When the whole trip is yours to place rather than one morning of it, start at the corporate programme; the version that runs beside conference sessions sits with congress programmes, and a faculty version with university groups.

The Morning, Hour by Hour

One school morning, in the order it happens. Every part of it sits inside the programme you are quoted for.

1

In the school

Two to three hours with a class, shaped with the teachers beforehand: yard games, a music session, English conversation, or all three.

2

Through the neighbourhood

A guided walk through the working streets the school belongs to. The school makes sense once you have walked them.

3

Lunch where the teachers eat

A working lunch in the same neighbourhood, at a place we know by name. Dietary requirements are collected with the enquiry and handled quietly.

4

What it funded

A plain account of what the visit paid for and what happens next. Teams that want to stay involved are introduced to the school, and the relationship stays theirs.

What Sits Behind the Programme

The school programme is older than the corporate one, and guest bookings have paid for it from the beginning.

School visits running since 2011
1,000+ students through the programme
BEFORE TRAVEL, TÜRSAB licence #7651
55 licensed guides
145 Google reviews rated 5.0
560 TripAdvisor reviews rated 4.8
Pupils in uniform crowding round the camera during a school visit

Groups We Have Run in Istanbul

Work delivered for companies here, named where they agreed to be.

Bain & Company

Corporate group · 14 September 2024

Group
19 participants
On the water
Private boat
On foot
Sultanahmet, 3 hrs
Opened privately
A cistern

A private boat cruise paired with a three hour guided walk through Sultanahmet: the Hippodrome, a cistern opened for the group alone, the Blue Mosque and the Arasta Bazaar beside it.

Booked for twenty and run for nineteen after a late drop, which is the ordinary reality of a corporate group and one of the things a written programme is built to take.

A private boat and three hours on foot, run as one programme rather than two bookings.

FlixBus

Corporate group · Istanbul

Group
15 → 17 → 20
Programme
Private walking tour
Guides
Two licensed
Kit
Whisper audio

A tailor made walking tour that changed size twice before it ran. Two licensed guides rather than one, because a walking group past about fifteen loses its back half, and a whisper audio system so the guide could be heard without raising a voice in a working street.

The group grew after it was booked, and the programme absorbed it.

MicroConf

Conference excursions · Istanbul · September 2025

Bosphorus cruise
Chartered, to ~90
Fishing
2 boats, ~24 per wave
Coffee workshop
20 places
Hammam
Cağaloğlu, 2 sittings

A conference does not move as one group. Delegates chose between four things happening at once on the same afternoon: a chartered Bosphorus cruise, fishing boats, a Turkish coffee workshop and a session at the Cağaloğlu hammam, with coaches timed to put everyone back where they needed to be.

The cruise filled, which is the useful part. When it did, the fishing option absorbed the overflow rather than anybody being turned away, and the coffee workshop was resized from thirty places to twenty so the spare capacity went where the demand actually was. Six separate dietary requirements were handled across the group, two of them coeliac.

Four excursions, one afternoon, and everybody back in time for the evening.

What People Teams Ask First

A working day built around a school morning. Your team spends two to three hours in an Istanbul public school or a music school The Other Tour has supported since 2011, then spends the rest of the day in the city around it. It is delivered as one programme, with a licensed guide, transport and a named coordinator, and the programme’s own history is at School Visits in Istanbul.

It is contact rather than construction. A morning cannot renovate a building, and what lasts is funded by the booking rather than by the hours. Where a school wants a hands-on element, it is agreed with the teachers and sized to what a morning can honestly do.

With the administration, in advance, during school hours, teachers present and in charge. Your team gets a short briefing on the school’s rules before arrival and follows those rules rather than ours.

The school’s consent rules decide, and they are agreed with the administration before the day. Faces are avoided unless the school clears them, and where a school says no, your team is told at the briefing rather than in a classroom.

Schools set the ceiling. One classroom works with a handful of visitors; a whole company works in waves or across the yard. Send your headcount and the answer comes back with the shape the school is comfortable with.

English runs on every programme and the roster covers ten languages besides Turkish. Inside the school the guide interprets both ways, so the conversation happens between your team and the children rather than around them.

There is no rate card. A quotation is written against your headcount, the shape of the day and the season, and it arrives itemised in the form your finance team needs in order to approve it.

BEFORE TRAVEL, the licensed Turkish company The Other Tour trades under. Licence 7651 on the TÜRSAB register belongs to it, and its name is the one on your contract and on the invoice. A PO number goes on where your process needs one, payment is by wire transfer, and the registry is public if your procurement team wants to check it themselves.

Send the Dates and the Headcount

Those two are enough. A written programme comes back with the school morning shaped round your schedule and the guide named before you fly. Add whatever your sign-off process needs in writing and it goes into the same document.

The Programme Around It

School visits in IstanbulThe programme’s own story, with photographs from the schools.The music schoolWhere the instruments go, and what a music morning sounds like.Corporate group programmesEvery shape a group booking takes in Istanbul, in one place.The evening afterGroup dinners and private evenings, on a boat or in a room you take over.Reviews from guestsTripAdvisor and Google, in the guests’ own words, the guide usually named.
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© 2026 THE OTHER TOUR by BEFORE TRAVEL - TÜRSAB NO: 7651.