English for Travel tutors, lessons & classes

Travel English is its own discipline, and it bears almost no resemblance to the English most adults remember from school. Classroom English drills tenses, vocabulary lists, and reading comprehension. Travel English drills how to ask the bus driver whether this is the right line for the airport, how to read the receipt the waiter just handed you in San Francisco, and how to politely tell the customs officer at Heathrow that you are here on holiday for ten days. Different curriculum, different stakes. Most travelers who arrive at our trial have taken some English somewhere (school, an app on the phone for a few months, a corporate course years ago) and discover that what they remember is the wrong vocabulary for what they actually need on the trip.

Destination shapes the curriculum more than students expect. The five major English-speaking destinations differ in vocabulary, pronunciation, and social conventions in ways that catch travelers off guard. The United States runs on Standard American English with regional flavors (a heavy Texas drawl in Houston, the famous Boston accent in Massachusetts, the New York speed in Manhattan), tipping built into the price of everything (15-20% in restaurants is not optional, it is wage replacement under US labor law), and small-talk-with-strangers as a cultural baseline. The United Kingdom uses non-rhotic Received Pronunciation in formal settings and Estuary or regional accents (Cockney in East London, Scouse in Liverpool, Geordie in Newcastle, broad Scottish in Glasgow) everywhere else, and a famously different vocabulary (lift not elevator, queue not line, chips not fries, biscuit not cookie, loo not bathroom). Tipping in the UK is 10-12% in sit-down restaurants only, not on coffee, not on cabs unless you round up. Canada combines American vocabulary with British spelling and a softer accent, and tipping conventions match the US. Australia uses British spelling, distinctive vocabulary (arvo for afternoon, brekkie for breakfast, servo for petrol station), a famously casual register (the bartender will call you mate regardless of who you are), and a tipping culture that sits between US-strict and UK-light. New Zealand is similar to Australia with subtle accent differences and the largest indigenous-language influence (Maori words like kia ora for hello have entered everyday Kiwi English). Your tutor calibrates the lesson to your specific trip, not to a generic English that does not quite exist.

The right pre-trip English curriculum starts with the situations you will actually be in. Restaurant ordering, including how to ask what is in a dish before you commit (and the very different waitstaff scripts in US versus UK restaurants). Asking for and following directions in cities organized on grids (most US cities) versus cities organized around medieval street patterns (London, Edinburgh, Boston's North End). Money: prices, change, asking for a receipt, splitting a check, plus the famous tipping calculator basics that catch every non-American visitor by surprise. Transportation: ride-share (Uber and Lyft in the US, Bolt in the UK), taxis (in London specifically, learning the difference between a black cab and a minicab matters), trains (the Tube in London, the subway in NYC, the streetcar in Toronto), buses, plus the specific vocabulary around airports, customs, and hotels. The polite verbal furniture of being a foreigner in someone else's country (excuse me, sorry, please, thank you, could you) which softens every request and which a polished traveler uses constantly. Medical and pharmacy vocabulary if you have conditions or take medications (US pharmacies are inside grocery stores, UK pharmacies are called chemists, and over-the-counter medication names differ wildly between countries). And the specific phrases for the inevitable problem moments: a missed connection, a wrong charge, a lost bag, a phone that stopped working.

Tipping is the single biggest cross-cultural friction point for travelers visiting the United States, and worth its own paragraph. In the US, restaurant servers are paid a sub-minimum wage (often $2.13/hour federally, higher in some states) on the legal assumption that tips will make up the difference. A 15% tip on a sit-down restaurant bill is the floor, 18-20% is standard, 22-25% for genuinely excellent service. Coffee shops have a tip jar but tipping is optional. Bartenders expect $1-2 per drink or 15-20% of the bar tab. Ride-share drivers get 15-20% in the app. Hotel housekeepers get $2-5 per night left on the pillow. Hotel concierges and bellhops get $1-2 per bag or per request. Tour guides expect $5-10 per person per half-day, more for a full day. The opposite extreme is Japan, where leaving a tip is genuinely rude. The UK sits in the middle: 10-12% at a sit-down restaurant if service is not already included on the bill, nothing on a coffee or a pint at the pub, optional rounding up of a cab fare. Mistaking US tipping conventions for European ones, or vice versa, produces the most common travelers' faux pas in either direction.

A few honest observations from years of pre-trip English coaching. Listening is the bottleneck, not speaking. Most adults can produce more English than they can understand at native speed, which feels counterintuitive until the first day of the trip. Native speakers answer at normal speed regardless of how slowly you have asked the question, and the first week of any trip is mostly about training your ear. Practice with podcasts, films, or YouTube content from your specific destination in the weeks before you leave, ideally with English subtitles (not subtitles in your first language) so your eyes and ears train together. Pronunciation matters more than grammar accuracy for travel. A grammatically imperfect sentence said with clear pronunciation will get you understood; a grammatically perfect sentence said with mangled vowels often will not. English vowels are notoriously difficult (14-15 vowel sounds depending on dialect, where Spanish has 5 and Japanese has 5), so practice the schwa, the two th sounds, and the stress patterns. Memorizing whole phrases beats memorizing isolated words: I'll have the burger, please as a complete unit is more useful than the six words separately, because real conversation runs in chunks. And one more thing: the highest-leverage move before any trip is one specific phrase rehearsed cold, used the moment you do not understand someone: I'm sorry, could you say that again more slowly? That single phrase gets you through more situations than any other piece of vocabulary.

Between lessons, build the ear with destination-specific input. Going to the US: any American sitcom, late-night talk shows, NPR podcasts (This American Life, Planet Money, The Daily), regional YouTube content from the city you will visit. Going to the UK: BBC Radio 4, British panel shows (QI, Would I Lie to You), The Crown, Stephen Merchant's stand-up. Going to Canada: CBC Radio, Schitt's Creek, Canadian YouTubers. Going to Australia: ABC podcasts, Australian comedy (Kath & Kim, the Bluey children's show carries the Brisbane accent surprisingly cleanly). For grammar refresh between sessions our 1,000 most common English words list is the highest-leverage vocabulary base, and our piece on English greetings and when good evening starts covers the social-register layer that classroom English skips.

A word on duration. Two weeks of pre-trip lessons is the minimum that produces a noticeable difference. Four to six weeks at one or two lessons a week is the sweet spot for most adult travelers. Longer trips (sabbaticals, extended family visits, retirement-relocation scouting) warrant 8-12 weeks of pre-departure work plus continuing lessons in-country. Last-minute prep is still worth doing; even one well-targeted lesson the week before a trip moves the needle on the situations you will face first (airport, taxi, hotel check-in, first restaurant). Do not let perfect-prep paralysis stop you from booking one session.

The Strommen English for Travel roster includes native speakers from across the English-speaking world: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, plus longtime ESL specialists who have taught traveler-English for years. Each tutor's bio specifies background and the destinations they know well. If you are heading to an English-speaking region we do not have direct coverage for, a tutor from a nearby variant will still calibrate to your destination. For broader English work beyond traveler-prep, our conversational English, Business English, and British English specialty pages cover related programs, and the English course page shows the full family.