Spark School Tour Terms and Conditions

Group Sizes and Free Teachers

Spark offers a free 1:10 teacher placement ratio for each group included in the price. If you need a 1:8 ratio, please let us know so we can include this in your quote.
If group size increases after the deposit was paid, and the new student(s) take the total size of the group up to the next category, the group will still be eligible to get another free staff member.
If a group size decreases after the deposit was paid, and the group size is now below what is required to get the previously agreed number of teachers free, the group is no longer entitled to get that number of free staff members for free. In that case they are required to pay for the extra staff member at a 2/3^rd rate.

Payment Conditions

In order to confirm your booking with us we ask for a 25% non-refundable deposit per student.
In the case of travel by air, rail or hotel bookings included in the programme, we will require an additional €150 (or equivalent in another currency) deposit per student. If this additional deposit is not received as required above, the tour price will be subject to availability of flight/rail seats and /or hotel bookings and it may not be possible to maintain the price originally quoted to you.
Payment of the final balance must be received no later than 6 weeks before the departure date.
If you prefer to pay in a different currency than Euros, please inform us about this when making the booking, so we can send you an invoice in your currency. The conversion rate will in this case be set by Spark which might be slightly different to the current exchange rate.
All transfer commissions must be paid by the sender.

Cancellation

If a student or teacher is no longer able to participate in the tour, their payments of deposits and tour programmes can be transferred to the registration of a replacement participant without any extra cost until 2 weeks before departure with the exception of flight or rail tickets (see below).
Flight and rail tickets will be subject to extra charges for a name change, the amount dependent on the railway or airline company.
In the case of a cancellation with no replacement member taking over the space, the following cancellation fees will apply:
1. More than 8 weeks before departure – loss of deposit
2. Between 4 and 6 weeks before departure – loss of 60% of tour price and any transfer payments in the case a refund were issued.
3. Less than 4 weeks before departure – loss of 100% of tour price
Spark cannot provide a refund for any part of the programme in the case of the group or members of the group missing their flight or in case of flight cancellations due to external factors (strike, environmental happenings such as volcanic ash, etc.). Participants should contact their own insurance to cover for these unlikely occurrences.
Spark has the right to modify or cancel parts of the programme, activity or service provided and guarantees to fully inform the group as soon as it is convenient and offer a replacement of the same standards or a full refund. Cancellations are extremely unlikely but possible reasons for cancellations or modifications could include:
1. Suppliers being unable to run an activity or service to the standard we expect or require
2. Factors outside of our control
3. Health and safety issues
In the extremely unlikely event of Spark cancelling the entire trip completely, Spark would refund the full amount paid for the trip but cannot be held responsible for any costs incurred outside of our services, such as transfer to the airport in the home country.
In the unlikely event of the Spanish or sending school country’s authority placing legal restrictions on travel to our part of Spain and you are due to travel within 14 days, then in the first instance we would work with you to postpone the trip to a later date. If that proves impossible after both Spark and the school have tried hard together to find a suitable date, then we would refund as much of the cost of the trip as we could. If we booked your flights they will be subject entirely to whether the airline provided a refund. We can only ever act on governmental requirements at the time of travel.

Extraordinary Postponement Conditions

These terms and conditions exist in the event of a postponement of a tour being agreed between the school and Spark due to an unforeseen disruption in travel or other serious concern. The following conditions of postponement exist for both residential (in Sparkville) and family stay tours:

For an extraordinary postponement to be possible:
1. There must exist some external factor effecting school travel or disrupting the programme. Spark and the school must be in agreement about this.
2. The school tour must be 2 weeks in the future but no more than 4 weeks further ahead.
  1. This date limitation exists to recognise it would not be possible to postpone a trip at the last minute without costs and likewise that it is not possible to predict how things will be beyond a 4 week period.
3. A new date for the trip must be agreed between Spark and the school.
  1. The school would be expected to be more flexible than normal with finding an alternative travel date and likewise Spark would do its utmost to fit the school into a future date. The date for the new trip must:
    1. be no more than one year ahead of the planned tour date.
    2. be agreed within a two week period of the postponement.
As long as the new trip date was mutually agreed according to the above conditions, Spark wouldn’t charge any postponement fee or change the agreed quoted price, with exclusion of:
1. If Spark had booked the trip flights, the school would be responsible for the flight change price and the new dates flight cost must be similar to the original trip. Also we can not guarantee travel insurance would be able to be moved from one trip date to another, this would need to be determined case by case.
2. Spark has no responsibility for any insurance or transport change fees accrued on the school’s end.
3. If the tour were in a new academic year and suppliers had increased their prices, the school would be charged for the difference in price. We would do our utmost to limit this with our suppliers, asking them to respect previous prices, but we won’t be able to control this 100%, especially not with things like entrance tickets to major attractions which will increase in price from one year to another.
4. No refund would be possible for students who could not go on the trip in the new dates. The school would be free to replace these students with other students and sort out refunds internally.
  1. Also the school can increase the student number coming on the trip but of course any additional student would be charged on the new programme price, bearing in mind any price increases.
5. If the school were due to stay in our residence and Spark and the school could not find a date which suited both, Spark would offer alternative accommodation in one of our collaborating hotels. If the school went for this option, over finding a date when the residence were free, the school would need to pay the difference in price between the spark residence and the hotel in the new dates.
Any hotel booking being able to be moved would be entirely subject to hotel agreeing to do this. We would of course push for this.

Photographic and Video Material

16. Spark remains the right to use in their marketing materials any photographs, videos taken, as well as student work or contributions done during their stay with us. Students or staff of course can request not to appear in photos.

Data Protection

17. The school accepts that Spark will register their data in our database to be used for communication and programme organizational purposes. The school also commits to having informed their students via their own documentation that their personal data will be passed to Spark for organization purposes. This includes: student’s: name, gender and age, Spanish level, dietry and health information and also any other data essential to the safe organization of school tour. Spark will deal with all information according to data protection laws of Spain and the EU. Our privacy policy is here.

Jurisdiction

18. In the unlikely event of dispute of this agreement, the school recognizes that any legal action would be handled and resolved in a court in SparkSpanish’s head office in El Puerto de Santa Maria.