Family Travel Tips: How to Plan and Enjoy Your Vacation with Family

With these family travel tips, you can avoid a lot going wrong on your family or multigenerational vacation. Perhaps you have a vision of what a perfect family getaway looks like—and it probably doesn’t include unhappy teenagers and a pouty spouse.

Instead, review the tips below to help plan and enjoy your vacation with family. That way, your trip can be a bonding opportunity between loved ones and a lot more in tune with what you have in mind.

CONTENTS – In this article, you will learn crucial family travel tips to ensure everyone has a good time on your next family vacation, including:

• Top Tips for Planning a Family Vacation
• Try A New Destination
• Choose Activities Everyone Can Enjoy
• Find Family-Friendly Accommodations
• Allow for Downtime
• Consider Every Generation
• Prepare & Plan Together
• Make use of Local Knowledge
• Final Thoughts on Family Travel Tips

How to Ensure Everyone Enjoys Your Next Family Vacation

Planning a family vacation is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, and a great way to make the most of a summer or other holiday period. But that doesn’t mean that there are never any difficulties.

As we all know, there are a lot of stresses that can often come with family vacations, even in just the planning phase. One difficulty you might know is that of trying to keep everyone happy while you are on holiday. This is a stress that every family experiences at one time or another, but the truth is, it is possible to keep everyone happy.

So, in this post, we are going to look at some of the most powerful ways to ensure that everyone enjoys your next family vacation as much as possible.

As long as you have thought about the following points, you’ll find this is a lot easier and more simple than you might think!

Then, everyone will look forward to the next vacation much more than they might have in the past.

For the best results, try these family travel tips.

Try a New Destination

First of all, forget where you might have been in the past, either as a family or independently.

In order to have the best possible chance of everyone having the best time on vacation, you need to think up a new destination that you have never been to before as a family unit.

This is important for so many reasons, most of all because there is no memory in that place of previous stressful times you may have had together. You will create fresh memories with one another, and that is going to be a much better experience on the whole.

When you choose your next destination, you will, of course, want to consider whether there are any places in particular that members of your family are keen to visit. If so, make a point of voting on it and see if everyone agrees.

Aim for a unanimous agreement on a destination, as it really is the most significant factor in whether everyone is going to have the best possible time.

At the very least, you will be much more likely to have fun and to explore somewhere new together, which in itself will make the experience a lot more memorable for all.

Choose Activities Everyone Can Join in on

It’s okay if there are one or two activities that are just for a couple of people, but largely you should aim to choose activities that everyone can join in on as best as they possibly can.

That’s because if anyone feels routinely left out, it can create a real divide in the family. The result may be hard feelings that cause a lot of stress for the remainder of the vacation.

Aim for varied activities, but again make sure that they are mostly things that everyone can enjoy in their own way.

As with choosing the destination, you might find it is best to vote on activities. That’s a good way to ensure everyone feels fairly represented in the decision.

Again, one or two people might not enjoy a particular activity. In that case, you can offer that they to do something different they will enjoy at the same time, or simply encourage them to try it out–they might be pleasantly surprised!

Anyway, and it could turn out that everyone enjoys the activities in question a lot more than you might have expected. All in all, this will lead to a better feeling of union within your family.

Find Family-Friendly Accommodation

When it comes to the accommodations for your family vacation, you’ll definitely find better options and worse options. Clearly, some hotels are better suited to families than others.

To ensure that everyone is happy, you’ll want to book family-friendly accommodations. It’s usually an easy task to search within the destination you’ve chosen. You’ll find that there are plenty of family-friendly options available world-wide. The challenge will be finding one that you will all be likely to enjoy equally.

Remember, family-friendly doesn’t just mean that there is something for the kids. You have to think about the adults too, especially any elderly members who might travel with you. They will need to be catered to, as well.

Similarly, you might need to consider special accommodations for any military relatives who might be with you, and that’s when you’d want to look at something like the military resort at Disney World as a viable option.

And don’t forget your own needs. Will there be some place you can find some peace and quiet, or some couples’ time?

Be sure that you think of everyone’s needs with the accommodations you have chosen, and this will keep everyone a lot happier with the vacation in general.

Allow for Downtime

No matter who you are and how close your family might be, everyone needs some downtime once in a while. So, you should try to allow for this as best as you can during your vacation.

It is normally a pretty straightforward thing to do—you just need to carve out some time during which everyone can relax and chill together. If you are someone who plans a lot of activities, then you might want to change that and instead punctuate your itinerary with periods of downtime as well.

Again, everyone has their own idea of how much downtime is a good amount. But as long as you are giving your family the chance to relax at regular intervals, that should mean that you can much more effectively keep everyone calm and happy.

In particular, downtime like this will ensure that everyone is much more able to enjoy your vacation and what is going on, without much difficulty.

If your family often seems to get stressed and argue with each other on vacation, as a lot of families do, the problem may not be your family. The problem may be over-scheduling.

So, allow for plenty of downtime, and you will be more likely to really enjoy the holiday.

Consider Every Generation

If you are traveling with a few generations at once, then you will want to make sure that everyone is being considered here.

Your elderly counterparts may move at quite a different speed compared to you as middle-aged parents, your college-aged children, or the youngest child in your party.

And when it comes to those kids, a ten-year-old can move at a very different pace to a fourteen-year-old, too!

As such, you need to consider every generation, taking into account how much they are likely to want to move around and how much downtime they’ll want.

If there is any imbalance here, then it is going to really throw things off in a big way. That’s why it’s vital not to overlook this step in the process.

Make sure that there are always options for those who want to move fast and those who want to move slow. Even if that means doing different things at different times, or even at the same time, it is a much better way of keeping everyone happy.

It also means that all can enjoy themselves much more than you might have thought possible.

Prepare & Plan Together

In general, you’ll be more likely to keep everyone happy and have a good time if you make a point of all preparing and planning together for the vacation.

Not only does this give everyone a chance to speak up regarding what they would like to do (and what they might wish to avoid), it also helps to get everyone excited about the trip itself as well.

In fact, you can make the preparation and planning stage something of an event in itself. By doing that, you are more likely to get everyone in the mood for the trip of a lifetime.

Related: A Step-by-Step Family Travel Planner: Your Easy Guide To Stress-Free Trips

Make Use of Local Knowledge

Whenever you are visiting somewhere new, you can always make much more of it by simply asking the local people for advice.

If you specifically ask them to help you with what to do as a family, then you are going to get a lot of information that you can make use of in whatever way you like.

This is one of the best ways to ensure that you are keeping your entire family happy, and it’s something that is definitely worth thinking about whenever you are trying to visit somewhere new together. This is especially true if you ask a family themselves what they would do in that local area.

It’s amazing how much you can learn this way!

Final Thoughts on Family Travel Tips

As you can see, there are a lot of things that you might want to think about when you are looking to enjoy your next family vacation. As long as you have thought about these things, you are in good shape.

That way, you’ll find that you can keep everyone happy and avoid the stress. And, that will get everyone more excited for the next vacation too, whenever that might turn out to be. Because all in all, the most important thing is to enjoy spending time together.

Click here to continue reading more easy travel planning tips.

Photo credits: camper – Kampus Production, water play – Yulianto Poitier, littles – Josh, Pops – Willink, resort – thanhhoa tran  (Pexels)