Tips for Travelling With Children: Direct Flights, Rented Cots and Doing Less

Family trips fail for one reason more than any other: too much planned into too few days.

Everything below follows from fixing that.

Tips for travelling with children start with doing less

Pick a single anchor activity per day and let the rest happen. A museum, a beach, a boat, a park.

Two is achievable with older children. Three produces exhausted children, short tempers and a holiday everyone remembers as stressful.

The corollary is fewer places. Two bases over ten days beats four. Packing, checking out and travelling are the parts children tolerate worst, and every extra hotel adds a full day of it.

Direct flights are worth paying for

A connection with young children is not one inconvenience, it is several: a second boarding, a terminal transfer with bags, a second round of security in some airports, and the risk of a missed onward leg with no easy recovery.

Where a direct flight exists, it is usually the best money in the entire budget.

If connecting is unavoidable, build in a long layover rather than a tight one. Sprinting through a terminal with a pushchair is how holidays start badly.

Rent rather than carry

Cots, high chairs, pushchairs, car seats and beach equipment can be rented in most established destinations and delivered to the accommodation.

It costs less than the airline fees for bulky items, and it removes the risk of a pushchair arriving damaged, which happens more than airlines like to admit.

Check what the accommodation already provides before renting anything. Cots and high chairs are often free on request and simply not advertised.

The gap between meals

Airports and attractions price food accordingly. Carry snacks and refill water bottles after security.

In countries where dinner starts at nine, plan around it rather than fighting it: a late-afternoon meal, then something small later.

The tablet question

Download everything before you leave, including anything that normally streams. Aircraft wifi is unreliable and hotel wifi is worse.

Headphones that actually fit a child's head are worth sourcing in advance.

Buy the policy with the first deposit

Children pick things up, and a minor illness abroad becomes a consultation, a prescription and sometimes a missed flight.

Buy the policy at the same time as the first deposit, because several benefits, cancellation cover in particular, only apply if bought within a window of that payment. Our guide to whether you need travel insurance covers the timing.

Short transfers beat good photographs

Some places are genuinely easier with children: short transfer times from the airport, accommodation with kitchens, safe swimming, and food children will actually eat.

That is a real filter, and it is worth applying before falling for photographs of somewhere with a four-hour transfer at the far end. Trips with grandparents in the party add another layer again, which is what our family and multi-generational planning is for.

Call Exquisite Travel Group on (916) 757-6300 and tell us the ages. The recommendation changes completely between a four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old.