How to Plan a Multi-Family Vacation

Planning a vacation can be an exciting, multi-month undertaking that teaches your family to work together and effectively within the confines of a budget, for an enjoyable goal. When you add multiple families – friends or cousins – to this planning setup, you can find yourselves either improving relationships between family and friends or, unfortunately, tearing them apart. If you want to deepen your friendships with others, finding ways to synergize and maximize your planning resources for a multi-family vacation is a crucial step. Do you need to know how to plan a multi family vacation? Start here.

Choosing Your Mode of Transportation

Most single-family vacations can be accomplished strictly from the family car or a rented vehicle. In a multi-family vacation, you have choices to make. If you’re flying to your destination, you will want to devote a whole day to travel because flying is exhausting: You have to get up very early in the morning, which is taxing for children (and adults with executive function problems), sit on an aircraft for hours which has become so much more mentally and emotionally challenging since the COVID-19 pandemic, and trust that when you come out on the other side, your luggage will emerge with you. Fortunately, modern airlines are much more trustworthy with your baggage than were ones in older times. Make sure that you leave some things at home. It’s never a good feeling to open your pristine, century-old guitar case only to find that the instrument inside now has a large hole in it. Only bring things on vacation that you’re willing to lose.

Choose a Resort With a Hot Tub

When thinking about how to plan a multi family vacation, your first thought is probably going to go to the amenities you’ll experience while on the go. These are a crucially important part of your vacation experience, too. Your vacation will be so much happier if you have a resort with hot tubs, and can relax your cares away in the warm water of your vacation resort’s swimming pool.

Of course another important step is to check the resort’s repair schedule. Many resorts now post online if they’re going to experience days when they have to perform hot tub repair, to lessen the inconvenience on guests who were heading to the pool only to find that the refreshing dip they were hoping for was off-limits for one of the days of their stay due to having to drain and repair or worse, shock the pool. It’s not a fun experience to find that your pool is closed when a vacation is all about fun and relaxation.

Go Boating

Boating is a fantastic activity for either a single- or multi-family vacation to share. Over time, a boat can be an asset that your entire family shares with others on a routine basis. A boat can also be a special vacation home for a multi-family vacation that you and your friends will never forget! When you pull back the canvas boat cover, you will open up a new experience for your family and friends.

As a total vacation option, boating does have some special issues if you haven’t been boating before. Boats, unlike cruise ships, are relatively small and don’t have many of the cruise ship’s active stabilization features. On a boat, you have very little buffer between you and the weather, so high seas can be difficult to sleep on and might make hot meals difficult. Boaters should resist the desire to experience “real sea life” and keep to protected and sheltered coves and bays. But a boating vacation is entirely possible.

Choose Delicious Restaurants

One of the biggest benefits of vacationing together is finding restaurants that your family alone would never seriously consider visiting. When your friend “knows a place” in a neighborhood not far from your hotel, you could find yourself learning about prime rib restaurants or other delicacies ranging from hole-in-the-wall family restaurants that have been around forever to elaborate, sumptuous Brazilian steakhouses. The whole point of visiting another city is to live in a way you’d never think of living in your hometown. Vacations are a perfect time to change your routine and be outside of your comfort zones. Just remember your sunglasses!

About Restaurant Reviews

If you’re serious about your vacation food, the Michelin Restaurants Guides and Zagat Survey are indispensable friends, as well as websites like Yelp and Google Review. Michelin, the tire company, is very selective about the North American cities they review. Currently, there are four covering North America: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington DC. The Michelin Red Guides have a simple three-star rating system: One star means that the restaurant is “worth a visit if you are in the area.” A second means that the restaurant is worth making a significant detour to visit. Three stars, like the famous French Laundry in Napa Valley, means a restaurant is worth planning a vacation around. For a diner used to eating out at home, a one-star restaurant is itself an experience that will exceed your ordinary experiences of dining out, with prix fixe menus and other exciting experiences.

The Zagat Survey was created as the North American equivalent of the Michelin Guide and has similar plain red covers. Zagat Surveys were first published in 1980 by Tim and Nina Zagat, to systematically rate every restaurant in New York on an objective 30-point scale that would be repeated across the country. The Surveys are extensive and now cover every major metropolitan area in the United States. Since 2018, the Zagat company has been part of the restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation, now a subsidiary of banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase.

Since the early 2000s, Yelp has been an increasingly successful competitor to traditional guide publishers Michelin and Zagat. Entirely online-based, Yelp’s searchable database of not just restaurants but all local establishments that are of interest can be a crucial resource to not just vacationers but locals interested in finding a new experience during their staycations and everyday excursions into their hometowns. The Yelp experience is ready and exciting for online users who are now the majority of vacationing families. If you need to know how to plan a multi family vacation, you should start with a good browse of the Yelp ratings for everything in the city you plan to visit. If you have a family member who enjoys finding out obscure details about new places and things, getting them excited about the vacation and then setting them loose on Yelp is a great way to find the most obscure and exciting experiences in your vacation target. Use your family’s specialties to your advantage!

Rent a Car

One of the crucial parts of having a vacation is transportation. Knowing how to plan a multi family vacation means you need to know how you’re going to get around at every point on your trip. You will need at least one vehicle per family for every segment of the trip. There’s no point in taking a vacation together, after all, if you can’t take some time out to see the things that your family wants to see that your friends’ family doesn’t, and there’s a chance to see each of these things alone. Kawasaki vehicles in the United States are mostly known for their motorcycles and ATVs, with their Ninja series of sport bikes being especially famed, but other car companies like Mitsubishi, and of course Toyota and Honda, as well as the American companies like GM and Ford and Euro-American corporation Stellantis represent a huge portion of the vehicle market and are all well-represented in rent-a-car outlets. Your representative or websites like Expedia will be able to point you at the right cars.

Rent-A-Car Options

Rent-a-car companies like Hertz and others are going to present enticing options for your journeys. Every rental car outfit has vehicle options ranging from tiny econobox cars to full-up luxury automobiles. Your friends and family will be able to look through your options and find the cars that fit everyone the best. A recommendation, unless your family is okay with the minimal options available, steer clear of super-budget options. National rental networks also tend to have larger, more reliable fleets and the ability to trade vehicles if your rented vehicle develops mechanical problems that are not your fault. If you know how to plan a multi family vacation you will need to have fully examined your options before you leave home and make sure that everyone is on the same page with cars – it’s hard on your family and especially on your kids if their best friends or cousins have a rental car that’s much better than theirs.

Protect Your Tech

Vacations can be rough on tech. Your home routine getting disrupted by going on vacation can mean an increase in drops and falls, and with technology being paradoxically more important than ever before and contained in fragile materials like sleek glass cases and capacitive-touchscreen facings, a broken phone can mean a serious disruption to your vacation. Making sure your phone is protected by an intrinsically safe iPhone case is part of how to plan a multi family vacation or even a vacation for just your family. Your tech can also benefit from an insurance plan if you’re going on vacation with it, to make sure that you’re able to replace it quickly and efficiently if you damage it during your vacation. Most insurance plans will do overnight replacements, a better option than finding and researching a local phone repair place that will do rush work for a reasonable fee.

Rent an RV

For some families, learning how to plan a multi family vacation means making sure that you always have mobility, and that means a motorhome. A motorhome or recreational vehicle is defined as a motor vehicle or trailer that includes accommodations onboard. When you have an RV for your next camping trip, you can turn your vacation destinations into the highways and by-ways of America, not just the charms of the big city – as exciting as it is.

Before you begin your RV vacation, make sure that you visit motorhome mechanics and make sure that your recreational vehicle repair is up to date and all checklists of repairable parts of the vehicle are up to date. Check your fuse box and be sure that every fuse is in good order and repaired.

Visit a Water Park

Ever since a water hose was let loose to slick down the grass on a hillside, people have been in love with water parks. The first tourist water parks were built in the 1960s and 70s. Lake Dolores Waterpark opened in 1962 and was followed in the late 70s by a virtual deluge of parks, including the infamous Action Park, now Mountain Creek Waterpark, opening in 1978, operated by the infamous Mulvilhill family from 1978 to 1998, and then during the 2016 season. It hardly needs to be said that a great way to plan a multi family vacation involves a stop at a water park. But water parks do need to be evaluated with more skepticism than a typical amusement park. Their water dispensers and water sources need to be examined because communal water can carry dangerous organisms if it’s not cleaned well.

In Sum

Now you know a little more about how to plan a multi family vacation. With this information, you can begin creating your itinerary and ensuring your travels are an experience you’ll never forget. Your family and friends will have an exciting time trying out new things in a new city, and you might just meet some new people along the way. What a fantastic thing to be able to offer your loved ones! Remembering how to plan your trip from airfare to hotels and attractions is hard, but engaging the whole family – all your families – will make this a great experience that deepens friendships and makes forever memories with the people you love.