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Touring prospective colleges economically, through video

By Bruce Mohl, Globe Staff, 01/12/03

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Checking out colleges with your teenage child can be a costly undertaking, but Cliff Kramon has come up with a quick, cost-effective way to take tours of schools across the country and around the world without ever leaving your home.

Kramon works as an independent college adviser in Tenafly, N.J., helping students decide what college is right for them. As part of that business, he regularly videotaped tours at colleges around the country for his clients to watch. Once his library became large enough, he decided it might be a business of its own.

Called Collegiate Choice Walking Tours, it offers videos of student tours at 410 colleges around the United States and 11 in five foreign countries. The videos cost $15 apiece plus shipping, which is $8 for up to four videos and $12 for five or more. Order forms are available at www.collegiatechoice.com.

"They're about three steps up from `The Blair Witch Project,' " Kramon said of his videos' quality. "It's really to give you a feel for the place, to let you sit back and ask yourself whether you could see yourself going to school there - or not."

Kramon is the first to say the videos cannot replace a campus visit. He says their purpose is to allow a student and his or her family to widen their search and then narrow the field without being buried by the cost of air fares, hotels, rental cars, and other travel expenses.

"A college education can end up costing $130,000 over four years," Kramon said. "You ought to research it like it's a big deal."

The Boston area is unusual in that it offers dozens of colleges within driving distance, but that's not the case across the country. "The trouble with a lot of schools is there's nothing near them," Kramon said, noting that a student trying to visit four schools in different parts of the country could easily run up a travel tab in the thousands of dollars.

On most campus visits that involve a plane trip, it's rare for both parents to go along because of the cost. Kramon said 85 percent of the time it's the mother who accompanies the child on the tour. He said his videos would allow the father to also get a sense of the school and participate in any subsequent discussions.

Kramon's tapes are like home movies. There's no background music or fancy camera work. It's as if a parent went along on the college tour and taped everything he saw. There's no editorial commentary by Kramon or attempt to tell a story. Whatever the guide says on the tour, right or wrong, he records.

The tapes take you all over campus, inside dining halls, dorms, libraries, gyms, and classrooms. They give you a feel for the campus. I reviewed tapes of Tufts University in Medford and Occidental College in the Los Angeles area, and the two couldn't have been more different.

Tufts comes across as a typical New England campus. There's the classic quadrangle, historic buildings, and landscaping that consists of mostly grass and trees. Occidental has white, modern buildings surrounded by fountains and lush vegetation. At one point in the tour, sprinklers pop up out of the ground to water the grass.

On many tapes, you see students walking to class, giving you an unscientific sense of the racial mix at the school and how the students dress.

Lots of information is also conveyed by the tour guide, everything from average class size to security, Greek life to dorm life, meal plans to Internet hookups. Although the tour guide is an integral part of the video, Kramon never actually shows you the guide's face. It's the one editing decision he insists on. "How the tour guide looks shouldn't matter," he said. "But sadly, it does."

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FunSun is dead

Back in July, I wrote about FunSunTravel, a company that was offering a too-good-to-be-true trip that included air fare to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., from any one of 55 cities, a sail to the Bahamas, four nights at a three-star resort there, a cruise back to Fort Lauderdale, a rental car to drive to Orlando, a two-night stay at a hotel there, and day passes to Disney World. All for $598.

I checked FunSunTravel out with the Better Business Bureau and the state of Florida and went over the itinerary carefully. I found some problems with the deal, but nothing to indicate it was a scam. Indeed, the Better Business Bureau of Southeast Florida had given the company a clean bill of health and said all complaints had been satisfactorily resolved.

Several months later, however, the company began to experience problems. Its travel supplier was unable to cope with the demand. Customers were told their itineraries would have to change. Then FunSunTravel.com disappeared.

Joshua L. Woodruff, who had booked a trip for February, e-mailed me in a panic, looking for help. It turns out FunSunTravel went out of business and was acquired by a company called Sunnytrips.com, which can also be reached at 886-883-1494.

At the Sunnytrips Web site is a message stating that "due to circumstances beyond our control, we are no longer able to provide these vacations" and promising full refunds to those who call. I called the number and was told by an operator that tens of thousands of people were affected, but all were receiving their money back. My previous contact at FunSunTravel no longer worked there and the operator refused to connect me with the new owner or owners.

Woodruff has since received his refund, so that's promising. But the whole episode is another reminder that, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Bruce Mohl can be reached at mohl@globe.com.