How to Plan a Family Trip
How to plan a family trip is the question I get most from people who have been daydreaming about travel for years and have not booked a thing. The honest answer is that it is not one big decision, it is a series of small ones taken in a sensible order, and the first one is not where you are going. It is how much time you actually have. Here is how I work through it.
How to Plan a Family Trip: Where to Start
First step in travel planning: where are you going?
This can sometimes be the most difficult part, especially for those who don’t travel often. You may have a million ideas in your head based on all of those intriguing photos you have seen all over Instagram making every destination look like the greatest place on earth! But how do you narrow it down? Or the opposite, you literally have no clue because you live under a rock and don’t have time for social media or travel daydreaming while chasing around four kids and working full time.
Start With How Much Time You Have
My best advice on narrowing down where to go should start with how much time do you have for your travels? Are we looking at a 4-day trip? One week? Two or more weeks? In my opinion, the amount of time gives you a radius of distance to work with. If you have four or five days to work with you don’t want to book a 16-hour flight somewhere, or even an 8-hour flight for that matter. The less time on a plane and dealing with layovers, the more time you get to enjoy the vacation. If you have a full week of travel, then you can reasonably fly from say California to Europe with a possible layover, if necessary, in both directions and still have 5 full days to enjoy your vacation. In my opinion, if you are wanting to travel a distance that will require a direct 16-hour flight or longer with layovers, you should probably be looking for a 10 day or more window for travel.
Travel Days Are Not Vacation Days
When I am planning a trip, I do not count our travel days as actual vacation days. To me, there usually isn’t much to enjoy navigating airports with a toddler or trying to keep your kid from touching every surface of the airplane within reach while snacking on who knows what. The need for sanitizer in my life has never been so crucial! If we are traveling 10 or more hours in either direction via a flight, then I usually count the first day in our destination as a day of rest because you never know how jet lag may affect you or your kids (that you may find playing on the kitchen floor at 3:30am your first night in Budapest because, hey, they’re not tired).
Decide What You Want Out of the Trip
Once you have determined how much time you have to travel…now it is time to determine what you want out of this trip. Are you looking for a relaxing beach getaway? How about something packed full of adventure? Or maybe you’re just looking to explore new cities and eat some good food. Open up google maps and start looking at what countries or cities may be within that acceptable travel distance window you have to work with. No matter your starting point in the world, there should be options within a reasonable distance whether you have decided on beach, mountains, city etc.
How I Research a New Destination
While looking at the map, open a search window and start typing in a destination you think could fit the bill. I usually click on “images” of that destination first to see if it strikes my fancy visually. If it meets my expectations visually then I start to google a little more about that destination like “best places to see in ______” or “best things to do in ______”, etc. If it seems like this might be a good fit for our next destination then I start to research flight options and costs. For tips on how to research a flight, check out our Finding a flight page. If the flight options/costs seem doable, then I move on to check out the cost of accommodations in that area. If you need help deciding whether you should choose an AirBnb or Hotel, check out our Hotel vs AirBnb page. If this preliminary searching (or daydreaming!) seems promising then I start to get a bit more serious in my research of finding a flight and where to stay.
What to Book, and in What Order
Once you have a destination in mind, the order you book things in matters more than people expect, because each decision narrows the next one.
Start with your dates and the length of the trip. Everything else hangs off this. The number of days you have sets the realistic distance, and it also decides whether you need to write off the first day as a rest day.
Book the flight next. Flights are the least flexible piece and usually the most expensive, so let them anchor the trip rather than squeezing them in around accommodation you have already committed to. For an international trip, start watching fares around 10 or 11 months out. That gives you time to learn what a normal price looks like on that route and to save toward it. The general advice is to book international flights 3 to 8 months ahead and domestic flights 1 to 3 months ahead, and if you are traveling over a major holiday, as early as you possibly can. Our page on booking flights with kids covers everything we check before we pay.
Set fare alerts while you wait. Google Flights and Skyscanner will both track a route for you, so you are not checking prices by hand every week.
When you do find the right flight, book it directly with the airline rather than through a third party site, even if the third party is a little cheaper. If something changes, and with kids something often does, dealing with the airline directly is far easier than dealing with a middleman.
Then look at whether the connection can work in your favor. If your routing already involves a stop, it is worth checking whether a long layover, or a proper stopover, would give you a second destination for close to the same money.
Then sort out where you are staying. How many nights you are spending in each place tends to decide this on its own, and our hotel vs Airbnb page walks through how we choose.
Last, deal with the boring admin: documents, insurance and everything else in our family travel safety tips.
Hopefully some of these suggestions help to get your travel planning wheels turning. There is no right or wrong way to plan a trip. Everyone has to find what works best for their situation or family. I just hope this inspires some hold outs or newbies to start doing a bit more than daydreaming. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to see this beautiful world and meet the wonderful people who live in it!
