Part 1 — Introduction and interview (4–5 minutes)
Answer each question aloud in 2–4 natural sentences. Press 🔊 to hear the examiner ask it. Don't script — react.
Part 2 — Individual long turn (3–4 minutes)
You have one minute to prepare (make notes!) and should then speak for one to two minutes. Use the timers — the discipline is the practice.
Describe a place you visited that changed the way you see things.
You should say:
- where this place is and when you went there
- why you decided to visit it
- what you saw and did while you were there
- what you expected it to be like before you arrived
and explain how visiting this place changed the way you see things, and whether that change is still with you.
You will have one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes.
Part 3 — Two-way discussion (4–5 minutes)
These get harder as they go. Build answers with: Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative view → Evaluation. Open the follow-ups only after you've answered — that's what the examiner asks when an answer is thin.
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of someone who travelled a lot without changing at all?
- What has to happen on a trip for it to change a person?
Examiner follow-ups
- How much of that is about the traveller rather than the place?
- Does the length of the stay make a difference?
Examiner follow-ups
- What do people even mean by an 'authentic' experience?
- Does chasing authenticity change the place being visited?
Examiner follow-ups
- What could each of them realistically do about it?
- Would you accept limits on where you personally could travel?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you give an example of the costs local people carry?
- Is there a way to spread the benefits more fairly?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is travelling for the photo necessarily a bad motive?
- Was travel used as a status symbol before social media too?
Examiner follow-ups
- What exactly would be missing?
- Are there situations where the virtual version might actually be better?
Examiner follow-ups
- Did the difficulty of travel in the past add something to the experience?
- Would making travel more expensive again be fair?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might that obligation look like in practice?
- Could that attitude itself become patronising?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might replace today's motivations?
- Could climate concerns reshape the whole idea of a holiday?
What a Band 8–9 performance should demonstrate
Judge your recording against the four official criteria. An accent is not required — clarity is.
Fluency & Coherence
- Sustains the Part 2 story from arrival to reflection without stalling — the place, the expectation and the shift in perspective connect as one narrative, not three fragments.
- Uses travel-story markers naturally ("the moment we turned the corner", "what struck me first", "it wasn't until later that…") instead of listing events with "and then".
- Handles the abstract Part 3 turn — from personal trips to tourism economics — without slowing to half speed.
- Extends answers unprompted: for the overtourism question, a Band 8+ candidate weighs two of the three parties before the examiner asks anything.
- Recovers smoothly when a place name or detail escapes them: "a little coastal town — the name will come back to me — anyway, the point is…".
Lexical Resource
- Precise travel and tourism vocabulary used accurately: itinerary, off the beaten track, day-tripper, peak season, heritage site, carrying capacity, souvenir economy.
- Distinguishes near-synonyms the topic invites: trip vs journey vs excursion; tourist vs traveller vs visitor — and uses each where it belongs.
- Photography language beyond 'take photos': frame a shot, candid, staged, capture the light, scroll through the camera roll.
- Natural collocations for the abstract questions: "strain on local infrastructure", "a romanticised image", "first-hand experience", "a fleeting impression".
- One well-placed idiom ("it completely turned my assumptions on their head") rather than a string of memorised travel clichés like 'travel is the best teacher'.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past narrative blended with past perfect for expectations: "I'd imagined somewhere quiet, but what we actually found was…".
- Comparative structures carrying real content in Part 3: "far more than the town can absorb", "nowhere near as beneficial as the brochures suggest".
- Unreal conditionals for the virtual-travel and pricing questions: "If flights cost what they did in the eighties, most of us would…".
- Passives used naturally when the doer is unknown or general: "the old quarter has been rebuilt for visitors", "prices are driven up".
- Cleft sentences for emphasis at the right moments: "What changed me wasn't the scenery — it was the people."
Pronunciation
- Place names and foreign words delivered confidently — a small stumble is fine, but repeated restarts on one name breaks flow.
- Contrastive stress carries the Part 2 arc: "I expected POVERTY — what I found was PRIDE."
- Lists of sights or activities use rising then falling intonation naturally, rather than flat comma-by-comma delivery.
- Weak forms keep long Part 3 sentences moving: 'to', 'of', 'than' reduced naturally in "more visitors than the town can cope with".
- Multi-syllable topic words — authenticity, infrastructure, patronising, phenomenon — stressed on the correct syllable.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Opening / context — one or two sentences fixing the place and the trip: where it is, when you went, who with. Don't linger; the card's weight is at the end.
- Reason for going — briefly, why this place: a recommendation, a family connection, curiosity, even an accident of routing. An unglamorous reason sounds more real than a grand one.
- Expectations — say explicitly what you pictured beforehand. This bullet is the setup for the whole card: without a 'before', there's no change to describe.
- The visit itself — two or three vivid specifics you saw or did, chosen because they collided with what you expected. One line of sensory detail (a sound, a smell, a conversation) lifts it.
- The shift — name what changed in how you see things: about the place, about your own life, about what you'd assumed. Be precise: 'it changed my perspective' is a claim, not a description.
- Concluding sentence — whether the change lasted, with evidence from your life since: something you now do, notice, or no longer say. This answers the cue card's final question explicitly.
“Is it really possible for a tourist to experience the authentic life of a place, or is that an illusion?”
- Answer: take a clear position — e.g. mostly an illusion, and the word 'authentic' is doing suspicious work in the question.
- Explain: give the mechanism — the moment a place organises itself around visitors, what tourists see is a performance of local life staged for them, priced for them, and translated for them.
- Example: one concrete illustration — a 'traditional' dance shown nightly at hotels that locals themselves only ever perform at weddings, or a market street where every stall sells to tourists and locals shop elsewhere.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — travellers who stay longer, speak some of the language, or visit people rather than places do get past the performance; authenticity is less about the destination than the relationship.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — so the honest goal isn't 'the authentic experience' as a product, it's accepting you're a guest seeing a partial view — and the tourists who accept that often end up seeing the most.
Common mistakes for this specific test
The cue card is not 'describe a memorable trip'. Candidates narrate beaches and meals for ninety seconds and tack on 'it changed my perspective' at the end. The change in how you see things is the card — the trip is only the vehicle.
The fourth bullet — what you expected before arriving — creates the gap that makes the change believable. Without a 'before' picture, the examiner has nothing to measure the 'after' against.
Picking your most impressive destination instead of the one that actually shifted something. A famous capital where nothing surprised you is a weaker card than a small town that overturned an assumption.
"Do you take a lot of photos?" answered with "Yes, on my phone." gives the examiner nothing to rate. Add what you photograph and why — two to four sentences is the natural length.
The first Part 3 question deliberately challenges this cliché, and candidates who recite it as their answer have missed the question. You're being asked whether it's true — take a side and defend it.
The question asks about responsibility — travellers, industry, government. A generic speech about pollution and plastic answers a different question and reads as pre-packaged.
"When I went to Goa…" works as illustration, but Part 3 asks about tourists, economies and societies. Band 8–9 answers generalise — 'in most resort towns', 'for many local families' — and use the anecdote as evidence, not as the whole answer.
Travel topics expose thin adjectives fast. Vary genuinely: striking, unassuming, chaotic in the best way, unexpectedly ordinary — precision beats enthusiasm.
That's a slogan, not an analysis. Say what specifically is missing — smell, risk, unpredictability, other people — and concede what VR does well. The question rewards dissection, not loyalty.
Candidates freeze because they don't know figures. The examiner wants reasoning — who owns the hotels, who does the low-paid work, where the money sleeps at night — not a report with numbers.