Athens
Madeleine
Our group travel specialist, which makes her a natural for family reunions and multi-generational trips — she likes the logistics most people dread.
The hardest part of a family trip is finding something everyone will actually enjoy.
A four-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, and a grandparent want genuinely different things from a week away. Plenty of destinations claim to work for all of them. Rather fewer do, and the difference usually comes down to details you can’t see on a booking site — whether the kids’ club takes a four-month-old, whether there’s a room that sleeps six, whether the walk to dinner is manageable for everyone.
That’s what we’re for. And a piece of advice we give nearly every family: build in a day with nothing planned. The trips that go wrong are almost always the over-scheduled ones.
Three ways to do it
What kind of family trip works for you?
Most families land on one of these. The right answer usually depends on the youngest and the oldest traveler.
One resort, everything included
Unpack once, decide nothing
The lowest-effort version, and often the best one with small children. Kids’ clubs that take infants, rooms that sleep six, and meals handled — so the adults get a genuine break rather than a change of kitchen.
A cruise everyone can share
Grandparents to grandkids
Everything on board is included, and each generation can do their own thing during the day and meet for dinner. From mainstream ships with waterslides to expedition voyages that expand a teenager’s horizons.
A guided family adventure
Safari, national parks, Europe
Trips designed specifically for families — a safari in Africa, the Galápagos, or the Mediterranean, with guides who know how to hold a child’s attention and a pace that doesn’t break anyone.
What we’ve learned
How family trips actually go well
Match the destination to the family
An active family in a sleepy resort is miserable, and so is the reverse. This is the decision everything else follows from.
Pre-book what you can
Tickets, tables, transfers. Waking up with the day already arranged is worth more on a family trip than any other kind.
Leave a day empty
Two, if it’s a long trip. Everyone needs a morning by the pool doing nothing, and the trip is better for it.
Rooms that actually fit
Connecting rooms, suites that sleep six, villas with a kitchen. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to a tense week.
Let everyone have one thing
One choice each that the rest of the family agrees to. It’s a small thing that changes how the whole trip feels.
Amenities we can add
Resort and shipboard credits, room upgrades, complimentary meals for children. Worth real money on a trip for six.
Who you’ll work with
Pick the office nearest you.
All four of our advisors plan family travel. Which one you work with is usually just a question of which office you’d rather walk into.
Dunwoody
Leslie
Planning family travel since 1990 — long enough to have booked the same families across three generations.
Dunwoody
Steve
Left a career as a chiropractor for a year-long trip around the world, and came back to help other people take theirs.
Tuscaloosa
Stella
She builds trips around local life — markets, long meals, the streets past the checklist. Often the part children remember longest.
Go deeper
More on family travel
Resorts, ships, and guided trips built for families — kept up to date through our relationships with colleagues around the world.
Who’s coming?
Tell us the ages and roughly when you’d like to go. That’s usually enough for us to start narrowing it down.
