My teenage daughter arrived in Tokyo and walked around FOR THREE HOURS lost and scared. We called the Tokyo school and spoke to staff, no one bothered to help her. This set the tone for the entire trip.
In my opinion, very expensive (I paid approximately $6000) and very disorganized. Also in my opinion, classes were sub par.
I paid several hundred dollars for an airport transfer that was never used. For the return, they were notified of the airport change approximately four weeks in advance and a limo still showed up to take the student to the wrong airport. We had to pay for this ourselves, despite paying several hundred dollars for the transfer.
I totally got the run around regarding a refund for the unused airport transfer. After emailing the customer service rep for assistance, I was advised to schedule a meeting with the "student experience coordinator." The "student experience coordinator" did not show up for the Zoom meeting and did not respond to my emails to reschedule. (I had sent several emails, previously, explaining this simple issue and no idea why a meeting was even necessary.)
As an aside, if you send your kid thinking they will be supervised after hours, they are not, in our experience. Also in our experience, a lot of the time students are unsupervised and going to bars. As I see it, you should not send your kid if you are expecting them to be supervised after hours.
In my opinion, once this company has your money, they care about nothing else.
Response from EF International Language Campuses
Dear Beth,
Thank you for your feedback on your daughter’s program with EF. We’re sorry to hear that your daughter did not have the experience we all hoped for in Tokyo. Regarding the return airport transfer we apologize for the miscommunication about your last minute change of her departure airport. Thankfully, her host was able to drive her to the correct airport for an on time departure and the transfer cost was applied towards this transportation.
While navigating any new place for the first time can be challenging, we do encourage students in predeparture meetings and welcome emails to call the school emergency phone if lost. Her host did take her to school and our school staff did make sure she understood the route to school and gave her an individualized orientation the following day.
The activities team also reached out to encourage her to participate in school-organized activities, which she did. While these activities are run by EF staff, our students ages 18 and older (like your daughter) are considered legal adults and are not fully supervised and have the freedom to explore the city independently. We apologize if that expectation was not correctly set during the admissions project.
Again, thank you sincerely for your feedback. If you would like to discuss further, please don’t hesitate to reach out at +1 800 992 1892 or ils@ef.com.