Travelling with kids – tips and tricks I learned the hard way
Having young children should not stop you from venturing forth to new and wonderful places.
Let me tell you that I am no adventurer by nature. I did marry one though, and along with the fact that much of my family lives overseas and I have always been interested in different cultures, my husband and I have vowed to travel every year somewhere new. The world is big and we want to see it all.
Here is a little background to myself and why I may be able to give you some travel tips.
I have three children aged 8, 6 and 1.5 – two boys and a girl. My first overseas trip with kids was when my eldest was 22 months. It was a trip to visit my sister who lives in Italy. Our second major holiday was once my second son was 3 and my eldest son was 5. My husband and I decided to travel around the world with the boys for five months. We went to the USA visiting Philadelphia, New York and Miami followed by Europe visiting the UK – London and Oxford, Italy and then Israel, and Hong Kong.
Now I have three children and when my daughter was 5 months old, we took the kids and went to Italy again on a skiing holiday.
I have learnt a lot of tricks about travelling with children that no one ever told me about and I think would have been very useful to know before I embarked on all these adventures. I will take you through the whole process, from booking the trip to finding your way to your destination and what to do while you’re there to make the experience as seamless as possible.
Choosing your destination
There are a few things I would recommend. Choose a destination that is suitable for the age of your child. Some destinations are easier than others. An easy destination is one that is naturally geared towards kids’ needs. A more challenging destination is one where the children’s needs in that culture are significantly different from your own, or a destination where children are not usually accounted for. Be aware before you book whether you are choosing an easy destination or a challenging one for the age of your child/children.
Surprisingly enough, one of our most unsuccessful trips was one we took to a beachside resort in NSW. We chose the resort because of all the amazing things on offer for children when the weather was good – from kayaking to swimming to surfing and theme parks in close proximity. What the resort did not account for was bad weather. Unfortunately, while we were at the resort, torrential rain bucketed down on us for five consecutive days. When we asked the resort to recommend some wet weather activities, they told us that there were none. They do not have a kids club and never advertised one – they were correct. I couldn’t argue with that. It was certainly my fault for having booked us a room in a resort with no wet weather facilities.
Lesson number 2 – if you have kids and your holiday is weather-dependent, make sure there is a kids club to entertain your children, should the weather turn nasty. On the other hand, my kids loved the holiday as they are not usually allowed to watch TV at home and I ended up letting them watch two in-house movies per day for five days straight.
Booking your ticket
At the beginning of 2009, we decided that we wanted to visit my sister in Italy at the end of the year. At that stage, we only had two children, by the time we travelled we would have three. We could not afford to pay for all the tickets so we decided we would go on the trip on the condition that we could get all the tickets on frequent flyer points.
1st suggestion – join a frequent flyer programme of the carrier you tend to use most for travel. For us it was Qantas. They are part of One World which allows us to use BA and Cathay Pacific as well.
I would suggest that you ALWAYS fly the most direct route to any destination. I want to share an experience I had in order to illustrate this point.
When we booked at the beginning of the year, we had no choice but to fly Sydney to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to London, London to Verona and then take a car from Verona to Ortisei. The trip would take us three days as we would have to stay overnight in Hong Kong and London. There were no direct flights from London to Verona on the day we arrived and no flights from London to the ski fields in Ortisei.
Although I was a seasoned traveller and knew the challenges of doing this trip, I really wanted to go, so I accepted that at this point, this was the only way we could get to our destination. But……..I knew that tickets would become available closer to the date of travel. We were flying on frequent flyer points which gave us very little room to negotiate flight changes, but every Sunday evening from the day I booked the tickets, I would call Qantas to find out whether any seats had become available on the flight from Hong Kong to Rome. This would be a more direct route than the one we had booked. I would then need to work out how to get to Ortisei.
Five days before our planned departure I called Qantas again, no surprise, there were four seats available on the Cathay Pacific flight to Rome. Persistence pays as they say. We stayed overnight in Rome and then from Rome we caught a train to Bolzano and then a car from Bolzano to Ortisei. We saved a day, as well as $750 in taxes, which the airline refunded us for not flying through London.
I am no adventurer. I am risk averse and I like routine. More than that, I think children like routine too. They like to know what to expect in any given situation. Once you have decided where you are going, it is a good idea to start telling your children about the destination. Get them excited, read books, learn words in the language they speak if it is not your mother-tongue. As your children get excited, so will you.
Work out your motivation for going and make sure there is something in it for you.
Be positive and have a can-do attitude.
Be prepared for the fact that you will be tired and short tempered and that times could be stressful.
Be willing to be flexible within reason.
IN MY NEXT BLOG: the advantage of using a travel agent, planning your itinerary, what and how to pack, and why you should never travel directly to Europe with an under-2 toddler…
FURTHER READING: 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…
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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.
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.
cheapbushire
July 12, 2014 at 9:25 am
Travelling with kids – tips and tricks I learned the hard way
So, over the vacations we initiated a several-leg cross-country journey with Maggie, and I was ready. Over-prepared, probably; however it paid off. Our flights were incident- and trauma-free. Not that we had figured it all out; however in this blog are some great tips and suggestions for traveling with a baby, supporting our trial-and-error experiences over the past year.