Category Archives: Advice And Resources

Stuck On A Freeway With Two Under-Fours

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Sydney With Kids: A Destination Page

I’m very excited to announce my first ever destination page on WanderMom.com: check out Sydney With Kids. If you’re planning a trip to Australia with your children, I hope you find the information on that page helpful. (You’ll be able to quickly find this page on the Destinations section on the Home Page).

I plan to add more destination pages as we continue our travels this year, particularly once we start our extended adventures this coming September.

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Preparing For Jet Lag

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What Makes Ciao Bambino A Valuable Resource For Traveling Families

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Today’s guest post is from Amie O’Shaughnessy, the editor of Ciao Bambino, a family travel planning website that I regularly recommend to family and friends looking for help finding accommodation which has been rated and reviewed by other parents.

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When I first started Ciao Bambino in 2004, there were a surprisingly few number of online resources providing family travel information.

The explosion of blogging has dramatically changed the travel information landscape. Now, experienced travelers have an effective technology platform to share stories, tips and advice on how they make travel with kids fun and easy. Every blog is focused on a different and important aspect of family travel.

Most parents agree that where you stay is an essential part of any successful family vacation. This has always been Ciao Bambino’s area of expertise and focus. Many hotels say they welcome kids, but lip service is very different than room configurations that support families and a friendly atmosphere. We started screening hotels in the most popular family tourist destinations in Europe, and have now expanded our coverage to North and Central America (the blog covers Asia, stay tuned for related hotels).

Thank you Michelle for inviting me to share why Ciao Bambino is a valuable travel planning resource for families! Grab a cup of coffee, there is much to say. Just kidding, there is quite a bit to say, but I’ll be brief.

Experience
When I look back at what I thought I knew when I founded Ciao Bambino I laugh. Yes, I lived out a suitcase for a year traveling around the world pre-kids, but we all know that this perspective is practically useless once you have a family.

Fortunately, I love my job and we’ve been diligent about frequent travel inside and outside the country with our son. We have one child so my perspective is limited, however, I’m so lucky to work with a great team including Nancy Solomon who has traveled extensively with her four children under 10.

Our direct experience is important, but what makes our perspective unique is that we’ve helped literally a few hundred families develop detailed vacation itineraries. Through running the Ciao Bambino trip planning service, I learned what parents want and need in accommodations when traveling with kids of all ages.

Who cares?
This matters because I took the feedback from our planning service clients and developed our hotel review methodology. We take the time to contact every hotel featured on Ciao Bambino. This allows us to thorough vet every property featured on the website and showcase the nitty-gritty details. We work on standard industry commission rates across our portfolio; there are no hidden agendas to push one property over another.

Details, details
Every Ciao Bambino review is comprehensive. Written by and for parents, we feature those tidbits that are otherwise in the fine print or not available at all without picking up the phone. Favorites for me include starting babysitting rates and the driving distance to medical facilities for more remote properties. We note the starting age requirement for every kids’ club, and if there is an associated fee to use it. Every property has unique pros and cons and our reviews clearly communicate what they are for families.

We also take the time to understand the starting rate based on the number of people traveling. This is the only price data point that is relevant with kids; even the hotels catering to families fail to list pricing in this way on their websites.

We cover all age groups
Babies, toddlers, school age, and teens – all of these stages have very different needs and requirements. What makes a property great for a toddler may not make it great for a teenager. We provide age-appropriate ratings for every property featured.

Reliability
User-generated content is more popular that ever now. It’s a great way to efficiently grow the amount of information on a website, however, the downside is quality. The vast majority of websites that rely solely on user-generated content have a quality challenge. The information presented may or may not be valuable and when you are a parent looking for consistent details, it’s impossible to compare two properties using reviews that do not provide an apples-to-apples comparison.

All of our reviews are template-driven, so the details presented are consistent and our readers can easily compare and contrast properties.

Time
Time is scarce for parents and we need a very efficient way to plan travel and make decisions. Our reviews use bullets to ensure details are easy to read and digest. My goal is that Ciao Bambino users are able to figure out the high level, relevant pros and cons for a property within five minutes or less. Full narratives about a property are great to evaluate your short list, but who has time to read through all that text just to narrow down a list of good options?

Quality
Even the best laid-out reviews are useless if the property reviewed is not appealing. We try to find independent, unique hotels that enhance the travel experience. This is more difficult to do in the US vs. Europe since many of the family-friendly options are chains, but we still manage to uncover the gems.

All requests made through the Ciao Bambino website go directly to the hotel for the latest pricing and information. We follow up with each and every client to ensure every part of a request has been handled. Plus, we give great free gifts for bookings.

Here’s the bad news. All the painstaking effort it takes to feature every property on Ciao Bambino means that our portfolio has been slow to develop. If you don’t see something that fits your needs – please check back – we’re working hard to review the best price and amenity options for families in destinations around the world.

Amie O’Shaughnessy is the Editor of Ciao Bambino, a family travel resource providing tips and advice, as well as comprehensive reviews of the best hotels and resorts for kids of all ages.

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Three Tips On Choosing Budget Family Accommodation

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Image by lindyjb via Flickr

I stay in budget hotels. With kids. And, you know, it’s more feasible than you might think.

It’s much more common to see reviews for expensive resorts and luxury properties in travel magazines and on travel blogs than to see reviews for budget hotels. Sometimes I wonder who really has money to pay $250+ per night just for a room to sleep in on a family vacation. It’s not that I never stay at more expensive properties, I do, but for my family, that’s the exception rather than the rule – and that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to travel frequently.

Choosing budget accommodation for a family trip requires you think about your accommodation choice in a different way than if say, you were looking at staying at a four-star hotel on a beach somewhere. If we’re going to hit the beach to relax and reconnect and plan to laze about a pool or beach (i.e. stay around our accommodation) for most of the day, then a dingy hotel or condo would spoil the whole trip. If, however, we’re road-tripping, making one-night stops along the way, or staying somewhere for a long weekend which will be filled with outdoor activities during the day I always consider the budget option.

A budget hotel is cheap, that’s the benefit of the proposition. By saving money on accommodation, you can spend more on activities or maybe just travel more often. The potential down-side is that you may sleep on a sagging mattress, share your room with colonies of creatures you’d rather not ever see anywhere near your toes – not to mention crawling across them – and the cleanliness of the bathroom facilities may be questionable. Oh, and you may hear more of the conversations and nocturnal activities of the guests in the rooms around you than you ever really wanted.

But not all budget hotels are bad. In fact, most of them aren’t. Here’s three things I do when choosing a cheapie hotel to try to make sure we get a good room at a decent property:

Learn As Much As You Can About The Property In Advance
I read prior guest reviews on TripAdvisor; I ask friends who are familiar with the area; I Google the hotel name for information which may be on personal blogs; I review every detail on the hotel’s website – particularly the pictures. It was because of this that I discovered that the Budget Inn in Walla Walla (where we stayed this past weekend) had been recently remodeled. Our room was scrupulously clean with new beds, new carpet and a new flat-screen TV.

Make Sure You Have A Backup Plan
This maybe something as simple as taking the time before the trip to call a more expensive property in the area and verifying that there is availability on the night in question. Or checking out hotels in the surrounding area online before you travel. The point is to have spent even a little time thinking about what you’ll do if you arrive at your chosen hotel and discover it’s an absolute dump and that staying their might actually endanger your childrens health. Which also means that realistically you can’t plan to show up at 11:30pm at night.

Drive Away If Necessary
This happened to us this past summer. We were driving from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara and since we’d taken a fairly long stop during the day, we decided not to push on for Santa Barbara that night. We thought we’d be fine with a budget motel in one of the coastal towns just for the night but when we drove up the place was a disaster. We didn’t even bother getting out of the car but instead drove across the street to a Marriott for a pricier, but more secure night’s sleep.

If you’ve got any other ideas or suggestions for families looking to make their travel dollars stretch further this year by saving a little on accommodation, do leave a comment below.

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Related posts and topics:
Accommodation
Family Weekend Getaways: Walla Walla

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Handheld Video Games, Kids And Travel

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My kids travel with their Nintendos
I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but that’s because I have a love-hate relationship with video games in general. I love the way they keep my children entertained – sometimes for hours at a time – but I can’t stand the way they keep my children occupied to the exclusion of everything else that’s going on around them.

That said, there is no doubt that in today’s world of over-booked flights, flight delays and other such traveling silliness, I have personally experienced how a good Nintendo game can be a parental life-saver. We were flying from Seattle to Puerto Vallarta via Phoenix. Our two-hour layover became four, then six hours. We boarded and de-planed twice. We shuffled on and off the plane through dinner time and the kid’s normal bed time. They were completely unfazed. CAM, at 10, had a new game for his Nintendo DS. BigB, at six was utterly fascinated watching his big brother play. We just lugged our baggage (carry-on only) on and off the plane and let them at it.

Managing video game use while traveling

The uneasy bargain that I have with my children with respect to their beloved Nintendos and my love of immersing them in new cultures and new places is that I try to enforce a “video games are for playing while we’re in transit” rule. There are subtle nuances to this rule: I’d prefer if they only used their Nintendos on the flights to and from our destination; they’d prefer if they could use them every time they sit in a plane, train or automobile. You can imagine the ensuing negotiations. But, even though CAM once exclaimed “Of all the moms in the world, why did I get stuck with you?” specifically because this particular rule, it does work most of the time.

I have been known to hide the Nintendos once we arrive at our destination. Ssh, don’t tell my kids. They always magically reappear when we’re about to board our return flight. And in the time in between, I pay for my choice by being soundly beaten in Scrabble and Set by CAM but also having many raucous games of Uno or Rat-A-Tat-Cat with both of the boys.

Managing video game accessories while traveling

The games are tiny, the power cords have an annoying habit of being left behind in our rented accommodation and the devices themselves are frequently rescued from pockets just in the nick of time – barely escaping the over-sized washing machines of laudromats all over Europe. (I have discovered that Nintendo games can survive the washer and the dryer and still function quite well).

We’ve lost way too many games while traveling. To me, this is one of those parental trade-offs which we make in the hope of teaching life lessons: if my children are responsible for their own games the benefit is that they will learn to look after their own games. The risk, of course, is losing games and the expense of replacing those games. Unless there’s really special circumstances, if CAM or BigB lose a game when we’re on the road, they chose whether or not they want to replace it out of their own savings or pocket-money. No discussion. So far, consternation and lamentations aside, that’s also worked out pretty well.

I find that game cases such as the CaseLogic Nintendo DS Game Case are a great tool to help your child keep track of his games, his DS and all the other DS paraphernalia while traveling.

What do you think?
Do you have a rant or rave about handheld video games for kids in general? Have you allowed your children to use them at home or while traveling? Do you perhaps allow them for traveling but not at home? And if so, how do you get your child to go along with that??

Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts, opinions and ideas.

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Four Tips For Finding Vacation Rental Accommodation

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I’m a huge fan of renting vacation properties directly from owners as an economical, affordable and sanity-preserving choice for family vacations. Sanity-preserving because I am a princess with regards to sleep in that I need my eight hours every night, no exceptions and that can be very difficult in a shared hotel room with two children – particularly when one of those children is a night-owl and the other an early-bird.

I recently helped a family member find a property for their upcoming vacation using Homeaway.com. My relative contacted me today expressing her satisfaction “for all my hard work”! I spent perhaps an hour researching and finding a property for them using a method I’ve practised many times when planning trips with my children. I’ve shared my steps below. Leave a comment and let me know if you agree, disagree or have any suggestions to improve this.

Research Neighborhoods At Your Destination
I use a guidebook for this step and if possible, I talk to someone who knows the area in question. In this case, I used the Lonely Planet Buy By Chapter service, picking up a couple of chapters of their guidebook for the state in question. I’ve found that it’s very useful to have some basic information on the neighborhoods in a city or the towns in a resort area before I start looking at property listings. If I can, I pick up a local map (or use Google maps) to get a feel for the geographic layout also.

Research Available Listings
With some information on the region you’re interested in at hand, browse through the property listings for that area. My current favorite site for this is Homeaway.com because I find their search tools very intuitive to use. Using their Advanced Search, I can search by keyword, property size, price, dates amenities and other criteria.

I use a $1,000/week price rule-of-thumb when browsing listings. Using this as my mid-point, I can scan for suitable properties at or around that price range as my starting point for further research. I’ve used this rule-of-thumb for a number of years while renting properties in various countries and so far I’ve had no problems finding comfortable, clean and usually pleasant houses and condos to rent. (See below for my math if you’re interested). It’s always great when I find that the properties at that price point are too big or too luxurious for my needs. If this happens, I re-start my search using a lower price point – usually dropping by $200 at a time.

The next criteria I use to cull the candidate property list is reviews. If there are no reviews for a property, I usually drop it from my list. If you really like the look of the property another option is to contact the owner and ask for reviews from previous customers.

Finally, I examine all the photos supplied critically. I expect there to be clear photos of the kitchen, dining areas, bathrooms and bedrooms. The absence of any photos of a room mentioned in the property description makes me suspicious. I love it when an owner includes a diagram of the floor plan however I have found that this is something usually not shown on the property listing but something which an owner will supply on request.

Contact The Owners
At this point you should have 3-5 properties which look interesting to you. The next step is to contact the owner and ask for further information. Many owners will have their own website on which they provide additional information on the property (and sometimes the area too) over what is shown on the bare listings on a service like Homeaway.com.

It’s been my experience that the more responsive the owner, the more likely it is that you will have found someone whom you can trust and from whom you can be comfortable renting. Owners who don’t answer enquiry emails or don’t answer your questions about the property directly in this research stage are not likely to be helpful if you have problems after you have arrived.

Repeat The Above Steps
At least until you’ve found a property and an owner which you think will work for you. This can sometimes take multiple concurrent conversations with a number of owners and sometimes it can take just one phone call. Keep in mind that your owner-direct vacation rental experience is likely to be more successful more quickly if you start to look early for popular rental periods such as high summer or winter holidays.

Additional Info: The Math Behind $1,000/Week Vacation Rentals
I don’t like to pay large amounts of money for the bed I sleep in when I travel, but I do like my bed to be clean. I love the ambiance and luxury – and room size – of a four or five star hotel, but the cost of such accommodations are generally well above my price range. So, stripped to bare bones, I did some research on the price of a bed in a hostel and in general, a private room in a hostel costs between $20 and $25 per night. Since there’s four of us, that’s $80 – $100 per night for the cheapest form of rental accommodation available or $480 – $600 per week. Pretty darn cheap – but it comes with very little privacy. I like having a private kitchen and bathroom and I love my kids having their own bedroom(s). Using $100 each as the value I put on each of these amenities gives a top-line price of $900 for a week for a family of four in a private house or condo, rounding up to $1,000 to account for extras such as air conditioning, cable tv and a cleaning service. As I say, using this as a starting point has worked for me for many years.

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What To Expect When You Travel With Children

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My friend J. – who’s a mom of a delightful toddler and is currently pregnant with her second child – likes to travel with her son (OK, and husband too), and is looking forward to traveling more with her children. Recently, she asked me an interesting question about traveling with children: When we travel, what should I expect from my son in terms of behavior and activities which he will enjoy as he gets older? We agreed that this was a very broad question and hugely influenced by the personality, disposition and developmental maturity of the child in question. So J. followed up with some more specific questions. I’ve tried to answer these based on my own experiences of traveling with my children. If you have questions on this topic, please leave them in the comments below and I’ll try to answer in a subsequent post.

When can I expect my son to remember a trip?

Before he was four, my oldest son had visited the U.K. and Ireland a number of times, Greece, Fiji, Australia and Peru. I know he doesn’t remember New Year in Lima or feeding kangaroos at a petting zoo outside Melbourne, but I know that he thinks he does because of stories we’ve told about those trips and the photos we took. Conversely, we visited New York when he was five-and-a-half and he has very clear memories of that trip. (Childhood amnesia or the paucity of memories of experiences prior to your fourth birthday is a psychological phenomenon.)

When should I expect to do a trip without a stroller?

I frequently traveled without a stroller – even when traveling with a preschooler and a toddler. This is a choice which is a matter of personal preference. I used a Baby Bjorn when my children were infants, and a Kelty Kids Carrier for hiking and travel when they were preschoolers (this is what we used in Peru and in France). I had a cheap, Kolcraft stroller which I used (rarely).

Again, I stress, this is a personal preference based on your comfort level in using a carrier, whether a hard-frame such as a Kelty or a soft-frame such as an Ergo, and also on whether or not your child is used to being carried and so is likely to nap in a carrier or not – since facilitating your child’s naps without having to stay in a darkened hotel room is pretty key to everyone having an enjoyable trip.

At what age can a child pack and carry their own suitcase?

My now 13-year-old older son packed all his own bags for a recent school trip. Yay! This was a definite first. I’ve been encouraging my kids to pack for themselves since he was at least six or seven. Packing lists are a great help in this – although the best packing list in the world is not going to help your child stay focused and pack! Using a packing list early helped my children become more self-sufficient in their packing. I also “pre-packed” by taking out the clothing they would need to pack and leaving in an obvious place for them to find (on the bed, by the empty suitcase, etc). Neither of these things helped in any way with their habit of wanted to pack their entire bedroom for a trip.

Usually, I pre-pack by doing laundry and making lists in the days before we travel and I set aside time on the last day before the trip to pack with the kids. When they were preschoolers this meant having them pack with me for ooh, maybe 10 minutes before they lost interest and I turned on PBS kids to keep them entertained while I packed. At five, they were engaged packers and pretty good at finding the things on the packing list – but still highly distractible. By seven, I could trust that they would pack everything on the list but would ask them to keep the suitcase open for me to check. And, as I said, at 12 I didn’t even check the contents of the bag.

While it may seem discouraging that you’ll be packing for the next few years for your child, the suitcase story is much better. An ambulatory toddler can pull a kid-sized suitcase. A preschooler will likely insist on pulling his or her own suitcase and by elementary school ages, most kids can pull along a carry-on-sized suitcase pretty easily. When we were in Italy last year, since we were traveling by train, we all used backpacks – even BigB who was seven at the time.

One thing to keep in mind before you pack that cute little toddler-sized suitcase is how you’re going to carry it and your child if he or she is asleep when you arrive at your destination. If you’re flying internationally, this can mean juggling a child and a suitcase which is difficult for you to carry through customs and passport control – not fun.

How old will my son have to be before he will enjoy an art museum?

This is probably the hardest question for me to answer. Art galleries are not really my thing. I’ll make a detour for interesting walks and gardens and I love classical music and opera, but I sometimes find that I forget to leave time to visit art galleries – at home or while traveling. Hence my children haven’t visited many. Also, one of my boys has ADHD which means we are significantly more likely to plan outdoor activities or at the very least, stick to kid-friendly aquariums, science museums and the like. I felt as if I was taking my life in my hands by bringing my boys to Scuola di San Rocco in Venice last June (the boys were 12 and 7). It was a tremendous success – as measured by CAM’s exclamation on Tintoretto’s prodigiousness and their overall appreciation of the size, scale and impact of the works on display. We had a great visit to SFMoMA last November and we’ve since visited the Seattle Art Museum (on a wintry Saturday afternoon) also.

Check out DeliciousBaby for successful stories of visits to art museums with preschoolers.

My general advice with respect to museums and other more adult attractions is this: take advantage of naptimes while your child is an infant or toddler – it’s a perfect time for you to enjoy the art in peace and quiet. With an active preschooler, if you think he or she will be able to focus for long enough to appreciate one or two paintings, then go for it. Even if you dash through the galleries and leave without really seeing much yourself, it’s still a success – and then build on that. If you can, visit to a local gallery, look at paintings online, and use “find-the-whatever-in-the-paintings” games to engage your child at a visit to a larger gallery. One day, usually between seven and eight – or older for children with attentional issues – your efforts will pay off and you’ll be able to sit, as I did, admiring your child admiring a painting and have a perfect parenting moment

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A GREEN Car Rental Company

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Have you heard about VroomVroomVroom?

I have to admit I haven’t used their service yet (being in an armchair travel phase at the moment), but I just LOVE their commitment to pay all of the carbon offsets for all car rentals reserved through them. You can check out all the details at their green car rental page. I did however, talk to the friendly folks at VroomVroomVroom and here’s what they had to say about themselves and their services:

We all need car rentals. They’re convenient, they take you places, and you can fit a lot of junk in the trunk. Not does VroomVroomVroom love cars, but they also love the environment – what’s the use, after all, of having a car rental if you can’t drive through forests, or to the beach, or to nature reserves? A lot of other companies aren’t so thoughtful. They’ll send you off in a car without thinking about the impact we’re having on all things green. Or, they’ll make you pay the extra to cover green programmes, but how can you trust your hard-earned money is going to the right place?

Esteemed nature expert Kermit the Frog once said ‘it’s not easy being green’. Perhaps the good folk living on Sesame Street weren’t aware of just how easy it really is! VroomVroomVroom makes it very easy, because we do all the hard stuff for you, like calculating your carbon emissions, and then off-setting them with environmentally friendly projects. The best part? It doesn’t cost customers a dime – they look after everything for you.

So how do we do it? First, we work out what your carbon emission is based on a simple calculation – burning one gallon of gas produces around 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. Then we factor in how far you drive, and what car you’ve chosen to book through VroomVroomVroom.

Next, they do the responsible thing and, through our partnership with The CarbonNeutral Company, they pay to off-set your carbon emissions. The CarbonNeutral Company are good people – they’ve worked in climate change for more than 10 years, and have over 200 carbon off-set programs around the world, including renewable energy, waste reduction, resource conservation, and forestry projects. All of their programs are reviewed by an Independent Advisory Group of experts, so we know they’re the real deal!

You see, it really is easy being green when you book with VroomVroomVroom. You can hire a car and go as many miles as you please, and know that like us, you’re green at heart.

Want to know more? Once again, it’s easy! Just visit www.vroomvroomvroom.com/green to have all your questions answered.

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Worldwide Economic Differences and Your Kids