There was a moment in the immigration office at Windhoek International Airport, Namibia, when, after being threatened with deportation, I came to realise that despite paying over £1,700 for much needed support, I was on my own. I had been held there for almost three hours after my passport had been confiscated and I was desperately waiting for my faithful gap year specialist; Real Gap to return my call. 

The room was roughly the size of the lifts in the DHT, stacked to the ceiling with used visa forms and a woman dressed as a judge asleep at the desk next to me. When the phone did ring a cheery guy called Tom greeted me: “Hi Jenni, how are you doing?” 

“To be honest Tom, I’m not great,” I replied. 

 An hour later I had been bailed out by an Afrikaans woman called Sharon – not a representative of Real Gap but the manager of the guest house where I would later be staying. 

Why had I spent the first four hours of my holiday detained by a zealous bureaucrat? A slip of my tongue followed by a misunderstanding had led to an argument about why I didn’t have a work visa. Furthermore, I had been left off the airport transfer list, making it very difficult to prove that I was a tourist.

In my bleakest hour, as Tom’s jaunty voice tickled my ear like aural eczema, I began to think that maybe Real Gap’s business plan is not centred on molly-cuddling hapless teenagers, but that they are in fact a profitable company who may or may not have my best interests at heart. It was a hard lesson to learn, after all, their website is always so colourful and in every photo people are smiling: the volunteers, the orphans, and I suspect, the bank managers…

Maybe I should have learnt by now. When I was 19 I took up an internship with a financial magazine in Shanghai. I was more than happy to pay the gap year company, Projects Abroad to act as middle man, organizing accommodation and the airport transfer for me. However, one Sunday night I found an angry and heavily perspiring Chinese man shouting at me in shanghainese. My mandarin got me as far as “Ni-hao” before I grabbed a pen and paper, mimed for him to write down his problem and asked my boss to translate this apparent argument for me at work. It transpired that Projects Abroad were behind on my rent and I was getting evicted. 

So why do I do it? It seems that when it comes to gap year tragedies, I like mine with a side helping of masochism. Surely I should take off the metaphoric stabilisers and save myself hundreds of pounds, because even with an international company holding your hand things still can, and do go wrong.

The main appeal companies such as Real Gap and Projects Abroad offer is a safety net. Real Gap pride themselves on “24-hour emergency support service and a contact number in the UK” and Africa and Asia Venture proudly informed me that everyone who travelled with them had an ‘account manager’ to look after clients as they prepared for their trip; a process which could take up to 18 months. 

 It seems to be the gap year equivalent to that universal vegetable dilemma: do you pay Adam Ramsey and have your organic weekly shop delivered to your door on a silver plate or do you get yourself down to Lidl and rummage through the baskets yourself? 

 The industry is certainly a successful one. The Year Out Group, an association of leading gap year companies, has 36 members who between them have assisted hundreds of thousands of volunteers on fully-supported, successful trips, and there are countless other companies besides that. But I am beginning to wonder how much of my money was going towards the trip, and what percentages were taken as profit. 

I contacted several companies attempting to answer this question and as polite as they were, I began to get the feeling that I was thoroughly annoying them.  

 Raleigh International, a charity made famous by Prince William in 2000, responded that around three quarters of the money paid by its 30,000 volunteers went towards “the cost of running an expedition”, including staff costs, food, transport, insurance and accommodation. 12% went towards recruiting volunteers, 11% on “head office overheads” and the final 1% is “the cost of the governance for running a charity”. Its charitable status means that out of the £2,995 the average student would fork out, all of the money should be reinvested back into the organisation. However, profit seeking companies only reinvest a percentage of their turnover.

Africa and Asia Venture (AV) have worked with 4,000 volunteers in the fifteen years they have been running and had an annual turnover of £1 million. After paying the twenty full-time staff, they stand to pocket around £45,000 per year: approximately 4-5% of the original trip costs. 

Real Gap however, “were not permitted to share such financial information” with me, but sent me a fantastically vague press release citing “extensive and varied marketing activities” as “one of [the] main overheads”. 

As Real Gap declined to comment further I donned my deerstalker and examined the evidence further using the project I did over the summer as an average example. 

Real Gap charges £1,749 for 4 weeks in Namibia, yet it is a different organisation which owns and runs everything once you arrive in Africa, and they charge £1,049 for the same trip. As this is a self sufficient company they provide the airport transfer, food and the wages of the in-country team. It seems £700 of my money went towards the wages of Real Gap’s 50 UK staff their “extensive and varied marketing activities”, as they put it. 

Real Gap, as a profitable company, justified this in asserting that “most people choose to pay a little extra for this peace of mind”. 

But how much is “a little extra” worth when even the most prepared of companies are unable to protect you against everything. In April this year four British ‘gappers’ and their tour guide travelling with VentureCo were killed in a bus crash in Ecuador. Mark Davison, director of VentureCo, said he had used the bus company for many years and although the risk assessment for the trip had identified the High Andes as the most dangerous areas for road travel, an accident in the coastal area was unusual. 

Even the parents of 19 year old victim Rebecca Logie acknowledged there was nothing VentureCo could have done to prevent the tragedy. Davison recognised any road travel in South America was “inherently risky” but Rebecca’s parents still stated they “did not want anybody to be put off by what happened to our daughter – it was an accident”.

There is another issue which is less often addressed, especially within the pages of a student newspaper, as to whether these fresh out of school teenagers are actually helping the communities which they have paid all this money to reach.

 I will happily hold my hands up as an example of a very well meaning, very middle class girl who has managed to blunder her way halfway across the world. While in Namibia I found myself in an operating theatre during a Caesarean, attempting to examine a uterus while desperately resisting all urges to both faint and vomit simultaneously. Fortunately, the mother-to-be was under full anaesthetic and had no idea that this under-qualified Brit was overseeing the birth of her first child. Yet there is an inherent arrogance in the presumption that because we have the money to pay for these trips (however overpriced they may be) our presence will be appreciated once we arrive. 

This philanthropic colonialism does however lead to huge boosts in the tourism industry of developing countries. Tourism is a key sector in popular gap year destinations – this year 14% of Mexico’s GDP is expected to come from travel, and Thailand’s economy relies more on tourism than any other Asian nation. 

These interlinking factors make it impossible to generalise whether volunteer work abroad is a good or bad idea, but whether you decide to pay a company to guide you through your trip or not, I am yet to meet one person who regrets their travels, whatever adventure or misfortune should befall them.