Top 5 Family Traveling Tips

Family Traveling Tips
Top 5 Tips for planning a perfect Family Trip

Some may argue that planning itself diminishes the excitement and sense of anticipation of unexpected pleasures and experiences. I do agree wholeheartedly, but when you are travelling as a family and that too with kids planning eases out a lot of unexpected issues that you may encounter on your trip.

Family Traveling Tips

In travel also, the old adage of: ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. holds good. So here goes… some family travelling tips to make your trip perfect and unforgettable, something that you can cherish as a beautiful memory without the sourness of some unexpected and unplanned contingency.

These are our Top 5 Family Traveling Tips for planning a perfect Holiday/Vacation

1. Family Traveling Tips – Plan well in Advance

Family Traveling Tips
It pays rich dividends to plan well in advance, we plan our family trips as much as 3 to 6 months in advance. It gets us the best deals for flights and hotels.

2. Family Traveling Tips – Flight Search

Family Traveling Tips
Spend adequate time doing your research on everything you would need, before finalizing your options. To start with lookout for the best rates for flights to and from your destinations on the internet. We use Skyscanner a lot to check out not only the most economical flights but also to see which is the cheapest month to plan our trip based on the airfares.

And we also never miss checking the Air Asia promotionAs airfares form a major chunk of the budget, this helps a lot. Another important thing to look out for when travelling abroad is the various aspects of visa application.

3. Family Traveling Tips – Look for that perfect Home away from Home

Family Traveling Tips

There is nothing like a bad hotel room to put you off on your travels. After all the hectic activities one yearns for a good night’s sleep in a good, comfortable bed. When it comes to booking accommodation, it is all about the best deal and getting value for money.

To this end, it is our experience that you cannot rely on only one search engine for getting what you want. We depend on a couple of search engines for our research before we zero in on our choice.

The ones we normally use are Trip Advisor, Make My Trip, Expedia, Clear Trip and Booking.com.
We usually shortlist a couple of places from Expedia or any of the others mentioned above and then go to Trip Advisor.
Trip Advisor helps us in finalizing our choice because:
a) You can search for hotels here and it gives you the rates available on different sites and you can look at booking through the one that has the best deal on.

b) The traveller reviews it features helps you decide, though a word of caution here, one should not look at just a couple of reviews and decide because most of the places will have negative as well as positive reviews. The trick is to see if at least more than 90% of the reviews are positive then it is a good bet.

 4. Family Traveling Tips – What to see and what not to see

Family Traveling Tips

Another very important aspect one needs to focus on before embarking upon your trip is the attractions and activities you would want to include in your itinerary. We again do online research here and shortlist the must-see places and activities for each destination as per our interests, the time we have and of course our Budget.

One thing to remember is it may not be possible to cover everything in a given destination, especially if you have a cramped itinerary. We again do a lot of research on the net here, also it is prudent to book tickets in advance for attractions where you anticipate queues. For example, on our trip to Rome, we had booked skip the line tickets to the Vatican Museums which saved us a lot of time.

For planning and booking our activities we again use Expedia as well as Isango, and found them good and providing value for money. Lastly, we almost always include a Hop on Hop of Tour of our destination, as this provides us with an orientation as well as a good idea of the major attractions.

 5. Family Traveling Tips – Before you step out, have a Residence to Residence Itinerary in your hand

Family Traveling Tips
The devil lies in the details. So plan down to the smallest detail before locking your house and driving to the airport.
For example, we have everything planned with costs when we start, right from how to reach the airport, how to reach our hotel in our destinations, what restaurants we will eat in, what attractions we will visit and when, how do we travel to these places, etc., etc..
These work for us and I am sure would for everyone. So the next time you plan your vacation with your family, just give a thought to these tips. We also recommend that you check out these posts:
This article about travel planning tips for a family holiday was also published in Huffington Post. Check it out here.
Tell us what you feel about our Family traveling tips!
Are you planning a last-minute Holiday?

Below are some useful resources to help you book flights/trains/buses, hotels, and tours!

Flights –  TripAdvisor or Agoda or CheapAir or Cleartrip or Makemytrip or Priceline

Trains –  Click here to book trains

Buses – Click to book bus

Tours –  Click here to book top tours around the world

Hotels –  Click to book the best hotels/resorts
Choose the best accommodation with TripAdvisor or Cleartrip or Agoda or Makemytrip or Priceline 

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Family Traveling Tips

Do You Love Traveling?

Do you want to know how to travel the world? We have put together a very useful travel resources page with the best travel tips. Go check it out now.

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69 thoughts on “Top 5 Family Traveling Tips”

  1. Great post! I would highly recommend MyTripKarma.com for planning all kinds of trips, as it allows you to do all of the above in a single app.

    1. Thank you Bilna. 🙂 Travel tips definitely make the trips more enjoyable as most things will be planned well in advance. Great to know you are traveling soon. Where are you off to? Hope you have a great and enjoyable trip!

  2. 5 finding a good house is always key!!! I have a huge immediate family for which we always have to find a house that accomidation all 18 of us haha. Often using sights in the US like vacation al rental homes. Etc. Thanks for this!

  3. Thanks for these awesome tips! I especially like number 5 – it’s so important to book somewhere, particularly if you’re staying for a longer amount of time, that feels like a home away from home!

  4. I love this! I do most of these when I plan my trips with my boyfriend but it will become even more important when I have kids. Thanks for sharing and safe travels 🙂

  5. Thanks for sharing these tips! Right now I’m planning my husband’s first trip to the beach… Condo and travel plans are set. Now making sure we get all the places and activities I want? That’s a list that needs made!

  6. It`s very interesting to read tips about how to plan atrip as a family. As a solo traveller I can afford to plan a lot less but I understand how travelling as a family needs more planning. I agree that the best time to book hotels and flights is the\ree months before, thats`s when I bok mine.

  7. Yes. It’s all about the research. Even when we don’t plan everything, we have such a solid idea of what we want to do. And we only just discovered SkyScanner and it IS amazing! We’re big Trip Adviser people too. We’re so aligned with you!

  8. Such great tips. I am nowhere near planning family trips right now lol it’s more girls weekends and random getaways but I remember our family trips growing up fondly. And am super grateful my Mom put so much thought into them.
    Now I feel like I am the one who does the planning and stuff when I go somewhere. I’m very much the “what’s the game plan” type of person and you are right the devil is in the details.

  9. We like to use Google flights as well to check on flight prices and you can never go wrong with booking.com! The tip about booking the Vatican tickets online is super helpful!

  10. Interesting perspective. I generally follow most of it except the itinerary part. I research well but generally work out a final one after I have reached the destination. Sometimes, taking inputs from the locals also, changes what you can see and when you should see it 😀

  11. I haven’t had the pleasure of planning a family vacation in a long time as my children are adults but do have fond memories of the ones we did take. Planning adds so much anticipation to trip. It was almost as much fun as the trip itself.

  12. Great article! I’m a big planner when it comes to traveling–if I’m going save up and then spend that amount of money, I want to make sure I’m maximizing my time and efforts! My husband, daughter, and I do a lot of family trips with my parents, sister, and her fiance: there’s just so much to juggle when you’re traveling with that many people. You’ve got some great tips here for people who are planning to travel in a larger group. 🙂

  13. I admire you for being so well structured…but hell that would drive me insane^^ I like going with the flow,if I like a place I simply sit down and have dinner there (if it’s in my budget)…but then I am traveling solo or if I travel with my family, we are all grown ups, so no need to structure everything…we started doing what everybody feels like^^ but then structuring also I think just works for some places…like Ireland we were able to plan pretty much ahead…for malaysia ahhh well not so much…you just never know what happens next 😀 I actually have come to love that, I do a lot less planning nowadays…But then everybody travels different…

    Your tips will be a great help for everybody who doesn’t know how to start and where to look ^^

    1. I agree with you Sabine. It is fun when we tend to be adventurous and go with the flow. It works best when we do a solo or couple travel. But as you said visiting certain places and that too if you plan to have a family vacation, it is always good to plan your trip so that you don’t have surprises. Not that planning eliminates any risk/surprises but to a great extent it helps you be prepared and know many things and gives you the time to relax and enjoy the vacation with the family.

  14. Yes, we are all about the plan… and then trying to stick with it. I think (besides the flights/costs) the place to place travel plan is the most important part. Especially for us on road trips with kids.

  15. Great advice and good tips! Traveling with kids requires indeed planning, not only to give them a certain structure and great time but making sure that as parent you have a good night of rest!

  16. Agree with all of your suggestions. I usually have two rounds of planning, an initial one to work out how long, what to do and what needs to be booked early- i.e. flights! and any specialty tickets. do Visas need to be organized etc. Then have another round about a month before we go to fill in the blanks of things we want to plan We do leave some time unstructured, unplanned to see what we find.

  17. JOHAN VAN AARDE

    Hi Voyager, How are you? Great article I found your post in Viral content buzz. Just want to say you got a very incredible blog about traveling. Very informative! I will for sure remember your words, and tips too. Im looking forward to keep in touch 🙂

  18. Great tips! For our family, number 3 is the most important. Our kids need a comfortable place to rest and then they can handle anything. Trip Advisor is the one resource that I couldn’t travel without.

  19. I totally agree with you: I always leave some room for last minute changes or expected events, but you need a good plan,especially when it comes to transport. Tripadvisor and travel bloggers are my go to resource for practical tips: there is nothing like personal experience!

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