resh off a visit to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, a group of travelers board a private jet from London to Cairo, tracking a solar eclipse as it obscures the sky across the globe. Thousands of miles away, another group navigates through floating ice bergs in the North Pole as a Harvard professor or otherwise affiliated scholar narrates the landscape around them.

These trips are part of Harvard Alumni Travels, a program run through the Harvard Alumni Association that offers curated, affiliate-led excursions to destinations around the world — at a price tag averaging between $7000 and $14,000. Many travelers are alumni who join week-long or longer trips led by Harvard faculty and scholars, who provide lectures and context throughout the excursion.

For James E. Salzman, a Harvard Law School graduate and current professor of environmental law at UCLA and UCSB, an interest in alumni travel began while teaching and leading travel excursions at Duke. When he received an email from Harvard promoting an upcoming trip down the Danube River in central and southeastern Europe, Salzman reached out to see if they had any openings for trip leaders. From there, he says, he simply “got into the rotation.”

While the format largely resembles a seminar, Salzman emphasizes that the appeal lies in a shared curiosity that extends beyond Harvard’s campus.

“You know folks who go to Harvard, folks who go to Yale are, by and large, naturally curious people,” Salzman says. “The world’s a big place, and there are a lot of ways people do things, people live, people think about things that are just really different than the way we do. I think it’s important to be exposed to that.”

That curiosity often unfolds as an ongoing exchange between travelers and the places they visit.

“That’s a very rare experience to have — when I give a lecture, and then the next day, the folks can sort of say, ‘Wow, now I really see things differently,’” Salzman says.

This sentiment is echoed by Robert C. Darnton ’60, a Harvard professor emeritus who has written a number of books on 18th-century French art history and culture. In traveling to Tahiti as a study leader, Darnton described the experience as a “tactile” form of learning that cannot be fully grasped through the classroom or the page.

“This was an extraordinary experience to see a part of the world that I had studied but never imagined I could see with my own eyes,” he says. “It’s a French very far removed from France, but it has many connections with French history. And to see it and feel it and get some sense of what it’s actually like — to see, for example, vanilla bushes that produced vanilla — was quite an amazing experience.”

Describing the trips as a sort of “movable seminar,” Darnton further emphasizes that they are not meant to be research-heavy, but rather educational in a way that enhances the travelers’ experience.

“I always write a letter to the participants suggesting reading that they could do, so that they could have more background and enjoy things more,” Darnton details.

Frances A. Ulmer, who served as the former lieutenant governor of Alaska, now acts as a study leader for trips Harvard Alumni Travels takes to Alaska. In her view, while statistics and written descriptions can sketch a place, traveling with an expert provides a deeper, more necessary understanding — even within one’s own country.

“I mean, 60% of all seafood that is harvested in the United States is harvested and comes across the docks in Alaska. Those numbers are interesting, but when you add color to what kind of fish we’re talking about and what the fishery technology is? Those are the kinds of things that a study leader can do,” Ulmer says.

That type of traveling, however, draws a particular crowd. At a previously reported average of 67, the program’s travelers rarely include young participants. While the high price tag likely contributes to these trip demographics, Salzman insists that time, not money, remains the biggest constraint for younger alumni. “Just being able to take a week, 10 days, especially if you’re raising a family, is hard,” he says.

The HAA does, however, financially assist students’ travel through other programs. The Student Travel Support Fellowships, for example, offer undergraduates opportunities during academic breaks to travel to places like Greece and Ghana, positioning the trips as both educational and community-building.

And for the study leaders of Harvard Alumni Travels, Harvard alumni trips provide a unique opportunity to see places they may have dreamt about for decades, free of cost.

David N. Hempton, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School originally from Northern Ireland, has been interested in pilgrimages since he was a “high school student reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” In particular, as a historian, he’d been interested in the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage journey that ends in Galicia, Spain, for years. As a study leader for Harvard Alumni Travels, he was finally able to go.

“There’s something about walking and seeing and talking and communicating and eating and sleeping together,” Hempton says. “All of those things I think add up to something really quite special.”

—Staff writer Alexander W. Anoma can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @AnomaAlexander.