Family Travel Planning
I have a tradition with my kids that goes back fourteen years: starting at the age of four, each of my kids gets to choose any destination in the world every year for a one-on-one trip with me. It began when my first daughter, at three, said she wanted to visit Antarctica to see penguins. It sounded like a great idea to me! I told her we would go when she was eight – the youngest recommended age – but I asked where she wanted to go in the meantime. She said Australia, we went right after she turned four, and a tradition was born.
Two questions I get frequently are “how do the kids select their destinations?” and “how can you afford to do that?” After all my kids have chosen easy destinations like Orlando and New York, but also more complicated, and expensive, destinations like the Faroe Islands, Croatia, Japan and the Maldives. And we always let our kids choose where we go for school breaks, which has led us everywhere from Charleston, South Carolina to the Galapagos. So here you go: five tips to making this work with your own kids, whether you’re looking at a bucket list trip, visiting family, or taking a cross-country vacation.
1. Pick a Destination Where Your Kids Want to Go
Kids have an amazing array of influences: school; friends; television; headlines; and YouTube to name a few. They’re learning about the US and the world far more than you realize. So they likely have places that have captured their imaginations. It could be the Eiffel Tower or Grand Canyon. It could be Africa or Washington, D.C. Talk to your kids and ask where they want to go. Every trip should be based around the kids anyway, so to me this is an obvious first step, but I frequently see parents booking vacations to places they, the parents, want to go, without consulting their kids. Could that still be an amazing trip? Of course. But the odds of having a successful vacation increase when the kids are involved from the start. And you might be surprised at where your kids want to go. I didn’t have Antarctica or Easter Island on my short list, but I went to both because my kids chose them, and they were incredible. My kids have literally broadened my world!
2. Or Plan Based on Interests
Maybe your kids don’t have specific places in mind, but I’ll guarantee that they have things they’re interested in. So suggest destinations that tie into their passions. When my youngest daughter was six, she said that she wanted her annual trip to be based around animals. So we went online and looked at animals around the world. She immediately became fixated on holding koalas and echidnas. Australia it was! We looked at various places where one can get up close with koalas and echidnas, and see other unique animals, and focused in on Brisbane and the nearby Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and Australia Zoo. Again, I didn’t have Brisbane on my travel wish list, but we went and had a great trip. And yes, my daughter got to hold a koala and feed an echidna – both of which are among her all-time travel highlights.
And years ago when the musical Hamilton first came out, our kids voted to head to New York for spring break to see the it. Two of the three had studied the American Revolution in school, and all three loved the Hamilton soundtrack, so we got tickets for the show and flew east.
3. Remember that Getting There Can Be Half the Fun
Whether you’re flying halfway around the world or driving across the country, see what else your kids want to add on. I love flight planning when my kids pick crazy international destinations. We sit down at the computer and start looking at routing options. This always leads to a discussion of connecting cities and what’s there that the kids may find interesting. We’ve stopped in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Amsterdam, and a lot of other great cities, simply because flights went through there anyway and there was something that captured the kids’ imagination. But it’s not only flights. When we’re planning road trips, we’ll look up all of the possible stops and see what looks fun for the kids. A really cool candy store? That’s a great excuse to stop! Sand dunes to run down? An interesting beach? Absolutely!
4. Don’t Spend More Than You Have To
I love showing my kids the world and planning extraordinary bucket list trips, but I still have the same backpacker mentality that I had in college and I hate spending more than I have to. So how do we plan amazing travel inexpensively? First, wherever we want to go, I figure out when the shoulder-season is: that month or so in the spring and fall typically when tourists are gone and prices are lower, but when the weather is still good. Heading to a theme park? Look at May and September, when schools are in session but the weather (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) is warm. And Europe in April and May is wonderful, before all the summer tourists arrive.
Second, since flights are typically the most expensive part of a trip, I work to get as many flights for free as I can using miles. For 20+ years, I’ve charged everything possible to a mileage-earning credit card, and we’ve flown to a lot of our destinations for free by using those miles. These are good cards to look into right now. I have some airline-specific cards, but I also like cards that allow me to consolidate miles and points and then transfer them to various hotel and airline partners as I need them.
5. Say Yes!
And lastly, when you’re traveling with your kids, get in the habit of saying yes. Be flexible. Ice cream at 10am? Running through a fountain without a change of clothes? Staying up later than normal? Sure! It’s vacation, and you only get a finite number of them with your kids before they head off to college. If the kids are happy, the parents are happy. And if both parents and kids are happy, it’s a successful trip. So relax your rules, say yes a lot, and make sure that everyone is happy.
But also be flexible on drastically mixing up your vacation if things aren’t going well. One summer we arrived at a villa on Lake Como that we had rented a year in advance, and immediately realized that there wasn’t as much to do in the area as we had thought. So we bought train tickets to Florence, booked an inexpensive last-minute hotel for a few nights, and had an amazing time. And we’ve done the same other summers when bad weather restricted the activities we had planned and put a damper on our vacation. Sometimes your best adventures can come from things not going perfectly – as long as you’re flexible and willing to change everything up when you need to.
Have you let your kids plan your travels? Any tips that I missed?
More from Travel Babbo
The Best Age to Travel Everywhere- TripAdvisor for Local Activities: Mountain Biking in Santa Barbara
- 7 Reasons to Head to Universal Orlando Now
- Spain with Kids – Five Family-Friendly Activities in Catalonia
- Things to Do in Salt Lake City with Kids – A Three Day Getaway
- 15 Breathtaking Views That Will Make Your Jaw Drop
So we use a variety of credit cards to maximize cash back, and I’m always leery of getting miles instead of cash back-there doesn’t seem to be a good way to compare the two and decide which is more valuable. Thoughts on cash back vs miles?
It’s a complicated question, and there are websites dedicated to really delving into benefits of different cards. For me it comes down to: 1) How easy is it to earn miles and 2) How much are they worth?
1) You can earn anywhere between 1 mile and 10 miles for every dollar spent on various cards and promotions. Partnerships like the Capital One/Hotels.com one give 10 miles per dollar spent on hotels through a specific website (hotels.com/venture), which effectively translates to 10% back – in the form of a refund of travel charges. That’s higher than any cash back card I’ve seen, which are typically between 1% and 3%, and can go up to 5% for temporary promotions.
2) Capital one miles are worth $0.01 each, but you get 2 for every dollar spent, you’re really getting 2% back on purchases – again when applied to travel expenses. Airline miles can be worth anywhere between $0.015 and $0.04 to me depending on how I’m applying them. If I have 25,000 miles, I would only redeem those towards tickets that are at least $375. If I’m applying them to a $500 ticket, then they’re worth $0.02 each. If I can apply 140,000 miles to a Business Class ticket that’s $5,000, that’s a value of $0.036 each.
Really, there’s no easy answer to your question since value depends on how you would be using the miles – and how you’re earning them. Since I earn as many miles as I can booking hotels through the Venture Card partnership, that’s the best return I’ve found. I’ve never had a cash back card. I’d rather try to maximize the earnings and value of miles. Plus mileage cards give much higher bonuses. If you’re valuing your cash back at 2% and airline miles at 2%, but if a card gives you 50,000 miles at the start, but a cash back card just gives you a $100 bonus, then that’s a $400 advantage for the mileage card, everything else equal.
How do you take your kids on shoulder season? Do you homeschool? Or just skip a few days?
We don’t homeschool. We have a week-long breaks in November, February and April, and we start the second week of September and end the last week of May. So that opens up a lot of shoulder season travel. We always head to Universal Orlando at the end of August / beginning of September, after the peak summer traffic. We went to Chile last year in April – at the very end of their fall season. Europe works well in April as well. And a few years ago we did an early-June Disney cruise in Europe – before European schools were out. Plus I don’t mind taking the kids out of school 8-10 days a year, and their teachers have always been fine with that.