Traveling with kids: Balanced Family Travel
Our approach of Balanced Family Travel makes regular traveling with kids possible for us creating life time memories. It essentially means a mix of Hectic and Relaxed, Fun and Learning, Luxury and Value travel with different formats like drives, short haul flights, long flights.
Feel free to also read through these 10 ideas to travel hassle free with the kids!! This includes some amazing trips for traveling with children.
Relax and Hectic
As a family we love to travel and having kids was no reason for us to stop traveling. Saurabh and I are very different people when it comes to traveling – vacation for him is to relax and laze around on a beach while for me its traveling to a new place and exploring a new culture/ food etc. The common ground for us is visiting new places and eating good food. Whenever we are in Delhi, we always try to make time to go to Chandni Chowk in old Delhi to feast on chaat, kulcha chhola and what not.
Add to this when our 2 legged beasts arrived on the scene, they had their own choices too. And of course to ensure our sanity while traveling, we had to pick options that would appeal to both the ages (as of writing this they’re 8yrs and 4yrs respectively).
This is one my foremost tips for family trips and one of the top tips for traveling with children.
Travel aligned with work/ school schedules:
Second among the tips for traveling with children or family is planning. For me, a key component of travel is efficient planning.
We usually take 3 – 4 vacations in an year and often get asked, how do we manage traveling with kids so much with our own hectic work schedules. The answer is both planning in advance and the love for travel itself. Leisure travel is the time we bond most with the kids as when back home in Dubai, they spend more waking time at school than with us.
Our year starts with checking the holiday calendar for both school and our respective workplaces. To optimize on kids’ attendance in school and our paid leave, we build our vacation calendar for the full year with Dates and Option of places. The option of places accounts for family choices amongst other things. Who doesn’t like their travel to be hassle free and some part of it is surely under our control if we choose our destination wisely. We make sure to travel according to weather even though we may end up traveling in shoulder or high season except when its similar all year round when we would prefer a low season. One meticulous check is weather in each and every city we plan to visit both while planning and 1 week prior to the travel – this helps us pack well and helps in no last minute surprises.
Travel Accounting for the family choices & circumstances
Leisure travel is time for re-energizing, unwinding, fun and family bonding (if traveling with kids or extended family). Another one of my tips for traveling with children is to take the kids’ choices in account. Thus the place you choose must be based on some of the metrics below.
Age appropriate destination:
If you search on tips to travel with kids or tips for family trips, choice of destination will feature as an important one.
This is planning for a destination that allows you to manage your kids the best. For instance, when I had infants and toddlers, I picked places where nursing in public was not a challenge or getting baby food from outside was easy. The trips were easy going and not dragging the strollers halfway around the world while tiring out a baby with an already famished young kid.
Additionally, pick a place where we didn’t have to pick the baby in a carrier and walk for miles. So we didn’t do long hike places, tough terrain and extreme weather places etc. With infants and toddlers, my picks would be relaxed beach vacation, visiting family and mixing sightseeing with the trip, a cruise, long road trips with stay in places where either you can cook or the hotel will be willing to cook baby food for you (Taj Hotels in India – I loved my stay in Taj Srinagar (Kashmir), Taj Green Cove Kovalam (Kerala) Taj Bekal (Kerala), Gateway Resort Madurai and Gateway Sasan Gir.
Luxury & Value Travel
Next in my list of tips to travel with kids or tips for family trips is a good mix of destinations. Since we like to travel often, we don’t always pick the 5 star resorts in the area. Family friendly hotels and resorts which have been highly rated and don’t break the bank get our vote. Quirky boutique hotels (like La Locanda in Amman) and unique luxury experiences like Rannutsav in Gujarat or Martian Tents in Jordan are always in our itinerary too.
Variety of Destinations in an year:
In an year we try to do a mix of drives (Delhi – Kasauli), short trips (Dubai – Azerbaijan), long journeys (Europe Trip), Hectic vacations (Turkey), easy going lazy beach vacations (Seychelles), and sometimes a laid back cruise.
Fun & Learning
In a way all our travels are always a mix of both as we all learn something new in all our travels. So what I am trying to say in this one is really a trip with museum or without museums. My kids enjoy some museums which are very interactive and fun like the Perot Museum in Dallas or Gobustan museum in Azerbaijan. But most of them in Europe are not fun for this age group and to that extent we always have to mix something more fun with such trips.
The very last one of the tips to travel with kids is different formats of traveling. The reason for this is actually based on the destination, weather, how we want to see a particular place and with our kids, what are we comfortable with. I know of families who don’t prefer long drives as their kids have motion sickness. In our case, both of them sleep off to glory and get their share of relaxation during long drives so we totally prefer it as much as possible. Long story short, I have seen that kids like to explore and almost always everything new – trains, metros, trams, carriages, heritage trains and what not.
So keep traveling and keep exploring!!
“We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate” – Pico Iyer.
