How to plan a family trip, in the order the decisions actually go
Family trips go wrong when you pick the destination first. The four constraints to write down, the booking order, and the passport rule that catches people.
Photo · Waldemar Brandt · Pexels
Most family trips go wrong at the first decision, because the first decision is usually the destination. It should be the last.
Pick the destination and you spend the rest of the planning arguing with reality. Write down your constraints first and the destination falls out of them, usually with two or three good answers rather than one contested one.
Here is the order the decisions actually go in.
Step 1: write down the four constraints
Not a wish list. Four numbers, on one line each, before anybody opens a booking site.
The dates you can genuinely take. Not the ones you would like. The ones that survive contact with two jobs and a school calendar.
The number. The all-in figure you are willing to spend, including the taxis and the ice creams. If you do not have one, you will find one afterwards and be disappointed by it.
The youngest child's age on the day you travel. Not today's age. This drives more of the plan than anything else and it changes fast between two and six.
The longest flight anyone in the family will tolerate. Be honest. This is usually the constraint that quietly decides the continent.
Everything after this is arithmetic.
Step 2: turn the flight tolerance into a shortlist
A rough and reliable rule, from families rather than from airlines.
| Youngest child | What works |
|---|---|
| Under 2 | Anywhere, but do a third as much. They fly better than toddlers do |
| 2 to 4 | Under about six hours, or an overnight flight, and one base |
| 4 to 7 | Long haul is fine with a plan. Two bases maximum |
| 7 and up | The constraint stops being the flight and becomes the walking |
The counter-intuitive one is the first row. A baby who does not yet walk is an easier passenger than a two-year-old who does, and a lot of families delay a trip past exactly the window that would have been easiest.
Step 3: check the passports today
This is the only item on the list with a lead time you cannot buy your way out of, and it is the one that catches people.
Children's passports are usually valid for five years, not ten. That is the rule in the United Kingdom and in the United States among others, and it means a child's passport expires roughly twice as often as yours and at a moment you are not expecting. Under-16s in the US also cannot renew by post and have to apply in person.
Then the rule most people have heard of and few have checked against their own document: a great many countries require at least six months of validity remaining on arrival, including the Schengen area and much of Asia, Africa and South America. A passport that expires in five months is valid and will still get you turned away at the gate.
The shape of the entry rule is the same for everyone and the detail is different for every passport, so check yours against the destination rather than against a blog. Our visa tool does that per passport and prints the date it was checked.
And the consent letter. If one parent is travelling without the other, carry a signed and dated letter from the non-travelling parent giving permission, with their contact details, in English. It is frequently not a legal requirement and it is frequently asked for, by airline staff as often as by border officials, and thirty seconds of paper beats an hour at a desk.
Step 4: book in this order
- Flights. Three to six months out for school-holiday dates, two to four
otherwise. Everything else bends around the flights.
- Beds. Once the flights are confirmed, never before. Check the occupancy
rules before the price: plenty of hotel rooms cap at two adults plus one child, which is the single most common family booking mistake.
- The two or three timed things. Not everything. The attractions that
genuinely sell out, and only those. Release windows vary enormously and some are brutal: thirty days ahead for some, three months for others, and a few go in minutes.
- Insurance, before the final payment. Cancellation cover starts when you
buy the policy, not when you travel, so buying it after you have paid the balance leaves the balance uninsured.
- Everything else, or nothing else. See below.
Step 5: build the budget in four lines
Do it per day, not per trip, because per day is the number you can check yourself against while you are there.
- Flights, the whole family, return, including seat selection and bags.
- Beds, per night, including any accommodation tax paid at the property,
which is almost never in the price you were quoted.
- Food, per day. Take the number you think and add a meal, because families
eat more often than couples do.
- Doing things, per day. This is the line where children are frequently free
or half price and adults are not, so work it out properly rather than multiplying by four.
Then add 15%. That is the taxis, the laundry, the pharmacy, the replacement sun hat and the day it rains and you buy your way out of it.
Prices abroad are in the local currency and the conversion moves weekly, so build the budget in the destination's money and let the converter do the rest rather than writing down a rate that is stale by the time you fly.
Step 6: two bases, and no more
Whatever the length of the trip.
Every move costs you a packing morning, a transfer with luggage, and a check-in that lands at exactly the wrong hour. Those are the parts of travel that children find hardest and that adults consistently underestimate when looking at a map.
Day trips give you the variety without the cost. A base with three good day trips out of it beats four bases every single time. Three bases is defensible over a fortnight, and rarely over a week.
Step 7: book the beds, leave the days open
The most common planning failure we see is the hour-by-hour spreadsheet.
Book what genuinely cannot be booked later: the beds, the flights, the two or three timed-entry attractions, and any restaurant that actually needs it. Leave the days themselves open. A family day survives one fixed commitment and collapses under three, and the good bits of a trip almost never happen at the time you scheduled them.
The practical version: one anchor per day, in the morning, then whatever happens. Mornings are when children are at their best and when the famous places are at their emptiest, and those two facts pointing the same way is the most useful thing in family travel.
Step 8: the packing rule
One bag per person, that they carry themselves, from about age five. It is not about the weight, it is about ownership: a child who is responsible for their own bag stops asking you where things are.
Then a day-one bag, in the cabin, with a change of clothes for everyone, the medicines, the chargers and the snacks. It covers the delayed bag, the spilled drink and the four hours between landing and check-in, which are the three things that reliably go wrong on the first day.
Plugs, water safety and driving side change at every border and they are all things a tool should tell you rather than a memory, so check them per country rather than packing on assumption.
What to skip
Planning around the youngest child's worst day. Plan around their normal day and have a fallback. Otherwise you design a trip nobody enjoys, including them.
Booking a "once in a lifetime" first trip. The trip where everything has to be perfect is the one where every setback is a failure. The second trip is always better than the first because you have learned your own family.
The shared itinerary spreadsheet with hourly slots. It will be abandoned by day two and it will make day two feel like a failure.
Choosing the destination before the constraints. Where this started, and it is the one that costs the most.
Assuming children cost a full extra fare everywhere. They very often do not. Under-11s travel free on London's Tube and buses, under-18s are free at the Colosseum, children up to sixth grade are free at Ueno Zoo, and under-10s ride free across Rome. The free list is real and almost nobody adds it up.
Where to go with it
Once the constraints are written down, the destination usually picks itself from a shortlist of two or three. These are the ones we have costed properly, with the free-entry rules and the age bands done for you:
London with kids is the cheapest major capital to do with children and the one where the arithmetic surprises people. Rome with kids is the same argument for southern Europe. Tokyo with kids and Japan with kids cover the country most families underestimate and then rate as their best trip. Bali with kids and Fiji family holidays are the two beach answers, and both turn on water safety rather than on resorts.
For timing, the when to go hub has the month-by-month picture, and the best time to visit Japan is worth reading even if you are not going to Japan, because it shows how to use arrival data rather than folklore to pick a month. The rest of the family guides are built the same way: age band first, logistics second, and one honest thing to skip.
Passport validity and consent-letter guidance checked September 2026 against the issuing governments' own pages. Rules for your own nationality and destination change without notice, and the government page is always the source of truth. Here is how we research and re-check guides.
