If you’ve ever sat in a study abroad planning meeting trying to pick the perfect destination for a university group trip, you know that it can be challenging.
You need somewhere safe enough for a dean to sign off on, but real enough that students actually grow from being there. Somewhere structured enough to hit learning outcomes, but open enough to let genuine connection happen. Somewhere affordable, accessible, and ideally somewhere that doesn’t just check a box on a syllabus — but actually changes how a young adult will see the world.
At Viva Adventures, we’ve built our company around the best answer to that question: Costa Rica.
We didn’t land here by accident nor because it’s trendy (though, today, it undeniably is). We chose this country because Costa Rica happens to embody the same values we’ve built our company on.
Costa Rica is a true partner in this business, and our mission aligns perfectly with this “little country that has heart.” Trip after trip, it remains the place we most recommend to universities looking to do more than just take students somewhere novel.
Here’s what we mean, broken down by the pillars that actually guide the work that we do.
In This Article
- Pillar One: Costa Rica is a Premier Destination for Responsible Travel
- Pillar Two: Slow Travel, Real Food, and the Blue Zone Way of Life
- Pillar Three: Safety & Risk Management Are Foundational
- Pillar Four: Real Community Connection
- The Bottom Line
Pillar One: Costa Rica is a Premier Destination for Responsible Travel
For Viva Adventures, being a B Corp Certified means we’ve been independently vetted against rigorous standards for social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency — the same standards that apply to how we treat our guides, our local partners, and the communities we operate in. A business cannot obtain certification on good intentions; it’s earned through verified practices around how it operates.
Costa Rica has been building the infrastructure for exactly this kind of travel for decades. It protects roughly a quarter of its land in national parks and reserves, runs almost entirely on renewable energy, and has made environmental awareness a matter of national identity rather than a niche market segment.
When we bring our student groups here, we’re inviting them into a country that has already built the systems, the local guides, and the community-based rural tourism models that make responsible travel the default rather than the exception.
For a university, this matters enormously. It’s not just about booking a trip; it’s about modeling what it looks like when a business treats sustainability and community impact as core operating principles rather than an add-on. Students, and especially those in Gen Z, both notice and appreciate that!
They are stoked to learn their dollars go to a local family-run soda instead of an international chain, their expert guide is from the community they’re visiting rather than flown in, and the “conservation talk” isn’t a slideshow but an actual reforestation project they get their hands dirty on.
Costa Rica is a perfect place for us to embody the B Corp values in the flow of every single day of the trip.
Pillar Two: Slow Travel, Real Food, and the Blue Zone Way of Life
Anyone who has traveled with us knows that we integrate Blue Zones ethos into our trips. Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula is one of only five Blue Zones on Earth, and the “Power 9” principles researchers identified there — natural movement, a sense of purpose, downshifting from stress, social connection, whole-food nutrition — aren’t abstract concepts to us. Our itineraries are informed very much by these principles, whether you visit Costa Rica’s Blue Zone or another part of the country.
We love to provide students with that style of experience as they are often running on empty by the time they reach us. Many of them are overscheduled, overconnected to their phones, undernourished by dining hall food, and eager for actual unstructured social time with their peers. A trip that just relocates that same frantic pace on a prettier backdrop doesn’t help — it just changes the scenery.
Costa Rica offers something structurally different. The culture here is “Pura Vida” — not as a tourist slogan, but as a genuine, practiced way of prioritizing community, presence, and enjoyment of simple things over hustle. When we build a trip, we’re not fighting against the local culture to create moments of slowness; we’re expanding on what already exists.
Meals are made with real ingredients, shared family-style, and we build in ample time to enjoy and digest. Days include real physical movement — hiking, swimming, biking — because movement woven naturally into daily life is one of the features of the longest-lived populations on the planet. Evenings have space in them for resting and reflecting. The students are given room to breathe (sleep, read, chill, ponder, etc.).
For a student group, this translates into something universities care about deeply but struggle to program for: genuine connection. You cannot manufacture connection with an icebreaker activity in a conference room the way you can with ten students watching the same sunset after a day of shared physical effort, eating together, phones largely forgotten. Costa Rica gives us the conditions to let that happen organically.
Pillar Three: Safety & Risk Management Are Foundational
None of the above matters if a university can’t trust that their students will come home safely, and this is where we take our responsibility the most seriously. Every activity provider we work with — whether it’s a surf instructor, a snorkeling outfitter, a bike rental company, or a jungle hiking guide — is fully trained, insured, and vetted through direct relationships we’ve built over years, not a quick online search.
Our lead guides carry Wilderness First Responder certification, meaning they’re trained specifically for the kind of remote, activity-based risk that comes with hikes to waterfalls, time on the water, and days spent outdoors rather than in a hotel in the city.
Before any group trip, we build out a full emergency plan protocol — a clear chain of command, identified medical facilities, and specific response plans for every activity on the itinerary, from paddleboarding to a jungle hike with a swimming hole at the end of it.
This is what allows the slow-travel, adventure-forward, community-immersed version of a trip to actually happen. Universities aren’t choosing between an exciting, meaningful trip and a safe one.
Costa Rica’s own tourism infrastructure — well-developed, professionalized, and used to hosting exactly this kind of educational group travel — combined with our own protocols means those two work seamlessly. This is the kind of trip that university administration can sign off on: both the risk assessment and the educational plan.
Pillar Four: Real Community Connection
There’s a version of “cultural immersion” that a lot of student trips fall into that’s really just cultural spectatorship — a scheduled visit to watch local people do something, photographed, and moved past. That’s not what we do, and it’s luckily not what is most predominant in Costa Rica.
Because of the density of community-based tourism operators here — family-run farms, cooperatives, indigenous-led tours, local guides who grew up in the towns they’re showing you — it’s genuinely possible to build a trip where the exchange goes both ways.
Students aren’t just observing pura vida; they’re sitting at the table for it. They’re working alongside a farmer instead of just touring the farm. They’re learning from a local guide’s actual life experience instead of a script. They’re stopping on the side of the road while our driver, Henry, procures fresh mangos or papaya for the group. That reciprocity is central to what we believe responsible travel should look like, and Costa Rica is one of the few places in the world where the tourism economy is built to support it at scale, rather than us having to construct it from scratch.
The Bottom Line
Every destination has selling points. Costa Rica has something rarer: it has the same values our company was built on, already embedded in its landscape, its economy, and its culture.
That alignment is what lets a student group trip become more than a checked box on a study-abroad requirement. It becomes a lived experience in sustainability, in slowing down, in genuine community connection — held together by safety protocols rigorous enough that a university can say yes without hesitation.
That’s the whole thesis behind Viva Adventures, and it’s why, of every place we could build our company in, we built it in this one.
