Usually yes, but there are several things to consider and it’s typically quite expensive to do so.

Your ILP program fee includes roundtrip international airfare to your ILP country from the group departure airport during the dates of your semester. In simpler terms, ILP is purchasing roundtrip international flights for your entire group, so you’ll receive the same group itinerary with a pre-determined return date. If you’d like to stay and travel longer after the semester, essentially you’d need to change your flight after it’s purchased to a new return date.

Whether you can change the date of your return flight and what the change fee would be is all determined by airlines. Most airlines make the policy on a ticket by ticket basis, so it depends on your specific ticket purchased by ILP (sometimes it’s not allowed). After your flight is purchased, you’ll just reach out to the ILP Team to let us know that you’d like to look into changing your flight home. Our Travel Agent will then look into your situation further (for a small fee) and let you know what the options are, if any, including whether it’s possible to change your flight, options for the changes you’d like to make, and the cost of those changes (given by the airline and/or travel agency).

Just as heads up, we’ve found that change fees given by the airlines can be quite high and most volunteers opt to not travel afterward once they find out what those fees are. In some cases the change fees are higher than purchasing a new one way flight home. We’re more than happy to help you look into your individual options so reach out to us if you’re considering it, but we want to be upfront that we’ve found that it’s usually quite expensive for most volunteers so that you can be aware of that when considering your plans.