Travelling with kids – tips and tricks I learned the hard way: Part II
From booking the trip to finding your way to your destination and what to do while you’re there, here are some useful tips from a personal experience of one veteran family traveller.
What and how to pack
I find that packing sachets of soaps, shampoos, conditioners and creams is easier than packing bottles. Bottles often leak. As you use the sachets, you throw them out. You can probably get a couple of washes from each and then, as your trip progresses, your toiletry bag becomes lighter.
Depending on where you travel, you may need to do some hand washing as you go. If you can get into a routine of washing your underwear each evening or morning while you are in the shower, then you will never run out of clean clothes.
I find rolling my clothes is the best way of keeping them uncrushed, but it is not the most space efficient system, so you will need to assess how much room you have in your cases.
On the occasions when we have done long trips which span seasons, I pack all the winter things in one back and the summer in another, and half way through the trip post a couple of boxes of the clothes we will no longer need for the trip back to Sydney. This lightens your load and makes it easier to find space for those amazing new items you will buy along the way.
Most important piece of advice when packing – if you buy new clothes overseas, always remember to take the tags off the clothes before you pack them and padlock your suitcases.
We travelled from Rome to London with four large bags. In one was a brand new winter wardrobe for each of the kids with clothes from some beautiful Italian boutiques. Needless to say, we only received three bags on the carousel at Heathrow. The fourth, with all the new, still tagged clothes had “disappeared”, never to be found again.
USING A TRAVEL AGENT
If you are flying a very complex route over a few months, it is worth using a travel agent. If you miss flights or have to change destinations in the last minute, travel agents are more likely to be able to re-route you.
Missing a flight can sometimes be a blessing in disguise. My husband was due to fly out of Sydney to Sao Paulo where he was going to be for a month of work. It was a Friday and he was going to miss a big family dinner planned for that evening. I drove him to the airport at 12pm and went with him to check his bags in. We looked at the departures board and searched for his flight number. No luck, his flight was not listed. With flight number in hand, we went to the check-in desk, at which point we were told that his flight left at 10am that morning. He had missed his flight! Sao Paulo was not the most popular destination for Australian travellers and there not many flights offered. More importantly, Larry was due to give a paper at a conference in two days time and he had to be there as guest of honour. These are the times we were happy to have paid the bit extra to the travel agent who booked his trip. We called her in a panic, she booked Larry onto a flight the next day and Larry was able to enjoy our family dinner celebration as well!
If you decide to book your trip via phone, try to create a relationship with the telephone operator. Ask their name (they have yours), find out which location they are working from and get a call-back phone number for them personally. That way, if you get cut off, you can call back and ask for that operator. Nothing is more frustrating than being on the phone to a booking agent for half an hour, the phone disconnecting before flight confirmation, and then having to go through the whole process again with another booking agent.
Choosing your travel route
If you want to get to a destination that will take a few stops, make sure you take the shortest possible route. Explore all options for arriving at your destination. For example, if you want to get to Ortisei in the Italian Alps, there are lots of ways to get there. You can fly to Rome and then take a train to Bolzano and then a taxi to Ortisei, or you can fly to London and then take another flight to Verona and then take a train to Bolzano and then a car to Ortisei. Or you can fly to Venice, then train to Verona, change trains and then take another train to Bolzano and a car to the ski fields. Explore all your options.
If the route you want is not available, book what you can, but only after you know what the penalties are for re-routing your ticket, if a more direct route becomes available. If you are only able to book a less ideal route and later your ideal route becomes available, it is very frustrating at that point to find out that you don’t have enough points or can’t afford to make the change.
The most important thing is that you do not set your children up to fail. You know your kids better than anyone, so be sure to put them in a position where they can shine, instead of self-destruct. I learnt this on the flight from Sydney to Rome with Aden, when he was just under 2 years old. Expecting him to sit quietly in his seat for close to 25 hours plus three stopovers was a disaster waiting to happen. By hour 16 Aden had had enough and so decided to use his newly discovered talent for high-pitched squealing to entertain the passengers around us trying to sleep.
Hence once very important lesson – never travel to Europe directly with an under-2 year old highly active boy. The next time we travelled, we did the sensible thing and stopped overnight in Hong Kong. We stayed at the airport hotel and slept soundly, had a big breakfast the next day, gave the boys some time to stretch their legs and then boarded the plane the next day for a direct flight to Rome instead of battling the painful stopover on London.
At the airport
If you can, invest in membership to an airline lounge. There are special partner arrangements or corporate deals which decrease the cost of these memberships. Ask about all the options and all the benefits. The lounge offers a place for kids to play, have a shower if you are in transit, internet and TV as well as food and drinks for no extra charge.
Be careful though that you understand the limitations to your airline’s lounge membership. Many lounges will not allow alliance airline ticket holders into their lounge. We were booked onto a Cathay Pacific flight which is part of the One World Alliance, but when we arrived at Hong Kong airport, we were denied access to the Qantas lounge because we were not holding a Qantas ticket.
IN MY NEXT BLOG: where to sit and what to do on the plane, feeding kids on the plane and on land, dangers of traveling by train in Italy, and more…
Catherine Fritz-Kalish is co-founder and General Manager of Global Access Partners (GAP) – a proactive and influential network which initiates high-level discussions at the cutting edge of the most pressing commercial, social and global issues of today. Catherine’s broad business experience includes coordination of a number of international initiatives for the SME unit of the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development) at headquarters in Paris, marketing and brand management within all seven divisions of the George Weston Foods Group, and working within the TCG Group of Companies in the area of start-up incubator establishment.
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RELATED BLOGS:
- "Travelling with kids – tips and tricks I learned the hard way": Part I – by Catherine Fritz-Kalish
Catherine Fritz-Kalish is the co-founder and Managing Director of Global Access Partners (GAP) and Director of the International Centre for Democratic Partnerships (ICDP) and ICDP Foundation. She also holds Board positions for a number of not-for-profit organisations.
