Our Third Annual : Tours for the Thinking Person : What’s An Elderhostel? Retiring Minds Want to Know

Elderhostel is an organization that lures retirees out of their comfortable homes and into far-flung dormitories for weeklong meditations on subjects from physics, to poetry to architecture. It began as a collaboration between a visionary hippie and a university administrator, and grew into a nonprofit group that has grabbed a massive market away from the highly competitive travel industry. It is, frequently, what older people talk about when younger people aren’t paying attention.

But now the elders are getting younger, and their travels are getting bolder.

Born in New Hampshire and based in Boston, Elderhostel has now been running educational travel programs for 20 years. The group, which began with 220 “hostelers” in the summer of 1975, served about 285,000 last year, allowing them a chance to travel cheaply, educate themselves liberally and wander the planet in one- to three-week journeys, eating cafeteria food, lodging at a network of 1,900 collegiate dorms, cultural institutions and other facilities. The group operates in 50 states and more than 40 nations.

“I have square-danced with a telephone lineman, scooped ice cream with a retired farmer, listened to opera with a college administrator, and photographed a Hohokum burial site with a retired nuclear physicist,” writes Mildred Hyman, author of “Elderhostels: The Students’ Choice,” a volume by an independent author that evaluates various Elderhostel programs.

So far, most of the program’s participants have been age 60 and above, following an arbitrary limit set in the organization’s earliest days. But beginning with the release of a new domestic program catalogue Feb. 24, the group will reduce its minimum age to 55. (In other words, baby boomers, on July 26, 1998--3 1/2 years from now--Mick Jagger will become eligible for Elderhostel studies.)

This isn’t exactly a revolution, since the program has long allowed Elderhostel “students” to bring along spouses of any age and companions as young as 50. But it is a sign of the ongoing evolution at Elderhostel. With its growth rate stabilized at around 10% after a staggering boom in its first five years, the organization’s leaders are facing up to the changing tastes of a new generation.

“People are retiring earlier,” says Elderhostel marketing director Karyn Franzen, and the organization is evolving to “address those changing retirement patterns.”

Demographers agree that the average retirement age has been falling for several decades. Figures compiled by the National Institute on Aging show that in 1950, 46% of men age 65 and older were still working. By 1989, that number had fallen to 17%.

Listening to the new retirees, the group’s leaders hear calls for more physically demanding programs and more luxurious accommodations, which they are attempting to reconcile with the program’s central mission of education and its affordable price structure.

For those interested in getting physical, there are Elderhostel collaborations with Outward Bound in Colorado. There is a week-long camping trip on the Hualapai Indian Reservation along the Grand Canyon (“shower facilities available midweek,” says the catalogue); or a Colorado River trip that includes a two-day, one-night rafting and camping journey that covers 64 miles of the river, including some white water; or an 11-day, 80-mile wilderness canoe camping trip on Maine’s Allagash Waterway, near which Elderhostelers will have the opportunity to dig their own latrines.

(Concerned by health risks inherent in the proliferation of such programming, the organization recently imposed a yearlong moratorium on new adventure-oriented courses. That ban has eased since the hiring last spring of a veteran adventure tour administrator, Rob Rubendal, who oversees safety guidelines and assesses physical risks.)

Meanwhile, those interested in finding the more comfortable fringes of the “plain and simple” Elderhostel lodging prescription may be intrigued by the indoor swimming pool and exercise facilities of Prude Guest Ranch in the Davis Mountains of Texas, or the historic four-story row house that has been rehabilitated for Elderhostel use (including elevators and private baths) at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

What lies behind these changes? Perhaps a generation gap. Many Elderhostel officials have noted that younger hostelers, who remember less of the Great Depression, tend to be less frugal and more interested in fancier accommodations--”and I think we’re going to feel that even more strongly when the baby boomers start hitting us,” Franzen adds.

Nonetheless, “educational experience is still the core of everything we do, and that is what sets us apart,” Franzen says. “A lot of operators put together a tour and then throw in an educational component. We start at the other end.”

The organization is also pushing its new Service Program, which links participants with charities such as Habitat for Humanity and Global Volunteers. Enrollment in the program had advanced from 500 in 1992 to 2,000 last year, but Elderhostel leaders say they were expecting more sign-ups than that and are uncertain about the effort’s future. (Since the mid-1980s, Elderhostel has also offered the Intergenerational Program, which unites hostelers and their grandchildren.)

The average Elderhostel program in the United States lasts six or seven days and includes five days of instruction (usually broken down into three classes that meet for 90 minutes each day; no homework or exams), five or six nights of lodging (two to a room, bathrooms shared) and 15 or 18 no-frills meals.

Instructors’ credentials range from life experience to traditional academic degrees (teachers go unnamed in advance catalogues) and subject matter varies just as widely. On April 2, for instance, some Elderhostelers will gather at Auburn University outside Montgomery, Ala., to learn about “The Architectural and Historic Legacy of Auburn,” “The Gothic and Grotesque in Southern Literature” and “Herbs for Health and Healing.” Others will step into a monastery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where the course schedule includes “Entering the Gates: An Introduction to Mysticism,” “Art and Architecture of the Hudson River Valley” and “Just Do It! A Writing Course.”

Meanwhile, in Brazil, some of the program’s 25,000 yearly international travelers will be winding up a three-week, three-city program on “The Amazon Jungle,” “Brazil’s Past and Future” and “Historic Rio de Janeiro.” And in England, others will be midway through a two-week course in “Architecture of London.” (International programs usually feature a single area of study, last two or three weeks and spend one week at each site.)

The average cost of domestic programs is $330 per person, transportation excluded, with a $75 advance deposit required. Cost of international programs is broadly variable and usually does include transportation. The Brazil program above runs $3,603, including air fare from Miami. The London program runs $2,172, including air fare from Los Angeles.

Elderhostel offers the same trip cancellation insurance (for an extra fee) that is suggested by cruise lines and other tour operators, and takes no more medical precautions than the average tour operator serving all ages. To organize foreign programs, Elderhostel relies on several operators of international tours.

Not surprisingly, there is a lingering problem with long waiting lists for the most popular offerings. Though Franzen notes that 94% of hostelers choosing programs got their first choice last year, that still left 150 programs with waiting lists, 30 of those lists with more than 30 people. (The organization uses a lottery to select participants among would-be hostelers who send in their deposits promptly.) Franzen notes that one recently inaugurated program--a cultural and regional history course in New Orleans--accumulated a waiting list of 600 names.

Elderhostel began with two men and a college president’s directive to make better summertime use of buildings at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The men were David Bianco, director of residential life at the university, and his longtime friend and educational colleague Martin P. Knowlton, who in 1974 was serving as director of an American Youth Hostel program at UNH.

Bianco was a veteran administrator with many ideas about reforming American higher education. Knowlton was a visionary type--white-haired, bearded, recently returned from a four-year backpacking tour of Europe and inclined to describe himself as a hippie, despite having been born in Texas in 1920, and having earned a Silver Star fighting in the Philippines in 1944.

Musing one day about campus residential settings and non-traditional educational possibilities, the two hit upon the idea of serving older, not younger, students. On the spot, they coined the term “elderhostel.”

The following summer, with help from $22,000 in federal funding, the program was born on five New England campuses. Hostelers would stay a week and attend three courses in that time. Most hostelers slept in campus dormitories and ate in its cafeterias while regular college students were on summer vacation. By the summer’s end, all courses were full. Knowlton and Bianco, discovering themselves holding an administrative tiger by the tail, both soon stepped away from management of the enterprise, and by the end of 1977, Elderhostel had been reshaped as a nonprofit organization that contracted with scores of educational institutions but belonged to none.

The new Elderhostel sought no federal funding, and shared participants’ tuition fees with its affiliate institutions. It was run by Bill Berkeley, a veteran educational administrator who remains the organization’s president.

“It was difficult for me to imagine that anybody could hold this thing together,” says Knowlton, who lives in Ventura and runs an Elderhostel-affiliated organization called the Center for Studies of the Future. “Most organizations don’t grow well. This one did. And I didn’t have anything to do with it. I rode that horse a couple of years, then jumped to save my life.”

Over time, Elderhostel grew from regional to national to global, with year-round scheduling and a committed corps of return customers, who often sign for a month or more of Elderhostel classes every year. One devotee, a 63-year-old erstwhile Iowan named Dorothy McAlpin, attended more than 40 weeklong programs in 1994, driving from state to state in a Winnebago.

“For a lot of people, particularly retired teachers and librarians and people who don’t have huge incomes, it’s a really reasonable way to travel. It’s almost cheaper than staying home,” says Mary Ellen Higgins, a retired librarian in San Diego who made her first Elderhostel excursion last February.

The trip was to San Francisco, with themes of art, history and architecture, lodgings in a motel on Van Ness Boulevard and modest catered meals. Despite having heard about Elderhostel for years, Higgins says she was surprised by several things: the attention spent on welcoming first-timers to the program; the group socializing that made the experience “sort of like being in camp,” and the vigor with which hostelers exchanged intelligence on programs they had liked or disliked elsewhere within the system.

“In anything that has such a large catalogue and so many programs, they’re not all going to be wonderful,” Higgins says.

These days, the work force at Elderhostel’s Boston headquarters numbers 110, the annual operating budget is about $13 million, and 10 catalogues are issued yearly (for domestic programs, for foreign programs, for newly added programs and for service programs; most updated every three months). Though every course is still affiliated with an institution of learning, only an estimated 30% of U.S. Elderhostelers now sleep in dorms.

Elderhostel officials say hostelers average 69 years of age and that about 65% are women. They also note that a disproportionate number--about 35%--are retired teachers, professors and other academics, but some hostelers say a key attraction is the chance to share interests with retirees of disparate backgrounds.

Though the program aims for egalitarianism among hostelers, author Mildred Hyman notes a certain “social stratification based on the number of hostels attended.” She also warns that the “single-friendliness” of programs can vary widely, with some courses dominated by couples.

Also, though spokeswoman Kady Goldfield says the organization has no specific figures on the ethnic background of hostelers, she acknowledges that nonwhites are underrepresented in the program. To seek a better balance, Goldfield says, the program has a full-time outreach coordinator assigned to recruitment.

Which is not to suggest that Elderhostel works for every retired traveler.

“If you’re not curious about the place you’re going, then you probably will not enjoy it,” says Chris Wuehrmann, coordinator of Elderhostel and other special interest programs at Yavapai College in Prescott, Ariz. “Elderhostel in general does not just make a purely cheap vacation. So much is wrapped around the educational experience that if you’re not genuinely curious, you’re not going to enjoy it as much, or find it as rewarding.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Scholarly Pursuits

To request an Elderhostel catalogue (specify domestic, international or service programs), write Elderhostel, Department JD, 75 Federal St., Boston, Mass. 02110; telephone (617) 426-7788 (but mail requests preferred).

Other groups offering budget-oriented tours to older travelers include:

Saga Holidays (222 Berkeley St., Boston, Mass. 02116; tel. 800-621-2151), formerly the operator of Elderhostel programs in England, offers a Road Scholar program of mostly international “learning adventures” for travelers 50 and older. The 43-year-old organization’s 1995 catalogue includes tours visiting England, France, Italy, Turkey, Central America, South America and East Africa. Most tours run $2,000-$2,800 per person, double occupancy, for a trip of about 13 days, including most breakfasts and dinners.

Smithsonian Odyssey Tours (800-258-5885), National Geographic on Tour (202-857-7500), Academic Arrangements Abroad (800-221-1944) and International Study Tours (800-883-2111 or 212-563-1327) also runs educational tours that attract many retired travelers but with fancier accommodations and higher prices.

Another source of related information is Transitions Abroad magazine (18 Hulst Road, P.O. Box 1300, Amherst, Mass. 01004), published six times yearly (subscriptions $19.95), focusing on economical travel opportunities, often involving study or work abroad.