The benefits of study abroad have been well documented. This paper presents a spring break international field trip to the Philippines that was organized as an optional one-credit lab course to be taken in conjunction with a full-semester three-credit geography course examining the relationship between forests and society. The field trip was to be hosted by the Institute of Tropical Ecology and Environmental Management at Visayas State University and offer an in-depth, hands-on learning experience on tropical forest ecology, but it was unfortunately canceled one week prior to departure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The arguments presented in this article are based on student essays reflecting on their experiences applying and preparing for the trip and its eventual cancelation, and the faculty members' experiences with program design, recruitment, preparation, and cancelation. This paper highlights how integrated international field trips can be more accessible and are able to preserve learning value in the face of global instability. It specifically discusses how integrated international field trips: (1) can benefit from targeted recruitment; (2) can lower the cost of international learning opportunities, in terms of both travel and tuition; (3) have timing benefits, including easing the time burden placed on students interested in participating and being more accessible to upper-level students; (4) have added benefits of being associated with semester-long courses, such as establishing foundational and introductory knowledge before departure, identifying specific opportunities for geographers to engage in interdisciplinary research with another field, and establishing relationships with peers and faculty; and (5) remove the "all-or-nothing" aspect of learning outcomes associated with stand-alone international learning opportunities in the face of global uncertainty.