Family vacations are a great way to escape the humdrum of home life and the stressors that are part of daily life. Traveling to a new and exciting place is an excellent way to bond as a family, enjoy new experiences, and learn new things. Depending on where you choose, your journey could provide new insights into new cultures or provide fun experiences that can help your family relax and recharge their batteries, refreshing everyone before returning to work and school.
However, getting the most out of your vacation requires a little foresight, and you should ensure that your household is fully prepared before you venture forth. Large file sharing platforms are especially helpful with travel preparation as you can store and share your files and documents, such as itineraries, confirmation numbers, photos, and videos all in one place. Considering all of these aspects in advance and being prepared ensures that everyone can have a good time while having all necessities on-hand while away from home. Here is what you need to know to prepare for your family’s next vacation!
Plan for Every Eventuality
Sometimes even a minor oversight can derail a fun-filled vacation, causing misery or inconvenience when you should be enjoying time with your family in a new environment. While you cannot account for every possibility, meticulous planning can reduce the opportunities for disruptions.
Start your planning as early as possible, at least a week before the trip but preferably more, as this gives you plenty of time to assess your family’s needs and create an appropriate packing list. It can take a herculean effort to think of everything your group might need, and you will likely forget some essential items during your first run-through.
The extra time gives you some thinking room to recall items and add them to your list before it is too late. You will also have the advantage of considering your location, prospective activities, and the length of your trip to make more accurate assessments for appropriate supplies. As part of this process, confirm your lodging(s) for the journey and maintain good communication with your vacation home rental management company so that you know where you are going and the best ways to get there.
Organize Fun for Everyone
What constitutes fun for adults and children often diverges, so when planning your destination, locations, and activities, have a family discussion that considers everyone’s interests and opinions. As you think of options, take votes and mark which places or events everyone finds intriguing – these are your high points. You can spread these as evenly as possible throughout your vacation as encouragement for everyone.
However, there will undoubtedly be places that some of you wish to go to and others find uninteresting. This is where you begin to compromise to find a happy balance, negotiating a stop at one place in return for something that pleases the other party.
If you can organize events back and forth to please everyone, including the high points after each compromise, you have a greater chance to please everyone. If so, the entire family will remember this trip as a positive experience for a long time.
Avoid Overscheduling
Planning can ensure that there are fewer bumps in the road and that everyone has a chance for fun, but taking things to the extreme can swing a vacation in the opposite direction. Remember that this is supposed to be a fun getaway from stress, and if you have packed your itinerary with little time for breaks between, your family will always be rushing from place to place, trying to reach the next activity before it begins or at least quickly enough that you can get everything in for the day.
That builds a hostile atmosphere that can suck the joy out of a trip. For each day, choose a reasonable amount of activities from your optimized-for-success list, and provide plenty of space between events or a significant block of free time afterward. After all, while traveling from one place to another or visiting one destination, you may learn about an incredible opportunity you missed during your previous research.
Without being locked into mandatory fun, your family has time to explore new opportunities or take sightseeing trips to places you didn’t anticipate. You will be able to do so at a more relaxed pace and have plenty of time to build lasting memories instead of a series of fleeting images overshadowed by a general feeling of harried anxiety.
Don’t forget to compromise with new locations, just as you did when planning your preset options! This is a vacation for everyone, so all thoughts and opinions should be taken into account. On this note, you naturally want your children to have a good time, and there is nothing wrong with tipping the scales in their favor. Nonetheless, this is your vacation, too – which leads us to our next point!
Set Expectations
A child’s day is based on routine, as they typically follow set procedures centering around school, which also maintains an organized schedule. This is by design, as structure assists children as they acclimate to a new environment and facilitates learning.
Your vacation is outside that schedule, and while you may have planned everything to a tee, this is a new experience for your kids. They can benefit from careful instruction about every aspect of your trip, such as how you will get there, where you will stay, what you will do and when, and what things will be like.
You will likely want to frontload their brains with some of this knowledge, but take a little time at intervals throughout the day or between events to explain what will happen and your expectations for their behavior. Their brains are not fully developed, so they may not understand why they have to go to some “boring” place that you and your significant other will enjoy or how compromise works.
Communication can make a world of difference, even with children, so help them to understand why you are going to certain places and what will happen there, as well as how the “boring” events balance with “fun” things they will enjoy. If you have all planned together as a family, this will go a lot more smoothly, but even in best-case scenarios, a vacation holds a lot of stimulation for a child, which can sometimes be overwhelming. Explaining everything in advance can help them acclimate to this deviation from their routine.
The Bottom Line
The point of a family vacation is to relax and enjoy one another, establishing memories that will last a lifetime while building stronger bonds. With careful preparation and a systematic approach, you can ensure that everyone has what they need for comfort and plenty of opportunities to enjoy themselves. Nevertheless, maintain an element of flexibility and keep the lines of communication open so that everyone knows what the expectations are and how your family will proceed throughout your sabbatical.
