the only way for to manage as a dad has been to take his wife and two daughters with him. With this blog, Matt shares some of the insights he’s gleaned along the way, as well as tips, tricks, reviews and other fun stories.

Great insight from a family travel icon

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Amie and family.

Amie and family.

One of the greatest things about being a family travel writer is having the opportunity to meet and talk shop with other family travel writers whom I have respected for years.

Like Amie O’Shaughnessy, who founded a family travel agency named Ciao Bambino in late 2003 after a year-long international travel sabbatical with her husband. O’Shaughnessy added a blog component to the company in 2007, and her blog now is widely considered among the best in the biz. (I could spend a paragraph listing all the awards the site has won but awards mean nothing to me; on Amie’s site, content is everything, and that content is fantastic.)

Given her two-pronged expertise, Amie is IMHO one of the most knowledgeable family travel experts in the marketplace today (especially on the subject of Italy). I also consider her a friend. The two of us serve together on the board of the Family Travel Association. We both were in Montana earlier this year. We’re lined up to work together on some big-time projects in 2016.

As much as I’ve interacted with Amie over the years, I’ve never had the chance to sit down with her and talk to her about the origin of her company.

That’s why I enjoyed the Travel Age West Q&A with her that published earlier this month.

I’m not going to rehash the Q&A for you on this page; you can click through and read it in its entirety in TAW. The bottom line: There are family travel experts for everyone. I specialize in advice and insight but stop there. For more serious assistance, for an expert who can help you and your family conceive, plan, and book a trip, check out Amie O’Shaughnessy. And tell her the Wandering Pod sent you.

Family travel in AFAR

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AFAR is paying attention. Are you?

AFAR is paying attention.

It’s always nice to see one of my clients give family travel some love, and I was especially tickled this week to read TWO separate pieces of content about traveling with kids in AFAR magazine.

(Full disclosure: I write a weekly column for AFAR titled “The View from AFAR.” It runs on Fridays.)

In the first effort, an article titled, “These Four Trends are Good News for Family Travel,” friend and editor Jeremy Saum recapped the highpoints of the recent Family Travel Association Summit in Montana. Saum boils down takeaways into easy-to-digest bullet points about why people should care about family travel at all. (In his last point, he quotes another one of my clients, from Expedia. Small and serendipitous world!)

In the second piece, a slide show titled, “Seven Outfitters for Kid-Friendly Treks,” the editors pulled together seven suggestions for outfitters worth patronizing when traveling with kids. I love that one of the picks in the slideshow is Country Walkers, which arranges walks all over the world. (In case you’re wondering, most of the treks in this slide show are for older kids.)

Both stories are worth a read; neither will take you more than five minutes to get through.

Elsa and Anna take to the skies

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Let it go, let it go.

Let it go, let it go. (Pic courtesy of WestJet)

Thankfully my kids have grown out of their “Frozen” fetish and grown into “My Little Pony” and similarly inane adorable girly things.

Otherwise, they might have freaked out upon glimpsing the newest plane from WestJet.

According to a company blog post, the plane, a 737, is custom-painted with “Frozen” themes and scenes, inside and out. On the outside, Olaf is toward the nose and Elsa and Anna are on the tail. Inside, the entire cast appears on the outside of overhead bin doors, and “snow” is everywhere.

To be clear, the plane makes a bold statement. It’s a marketing play, plain and simple. It also serves as proof positive of what I’m sure is a healthy and productive relationship between the airline and Disney Parks. That said, especially for the Villano girls, “Frozen” is yesterday’s news, which means WestJet is about a year too late to guarantee this paint job is on trend.

Still, the effort raises some fascinating questions about kids’ preferences and family travel overall. Do kids really get MORE excited about flying in planes with their favorite characters? If so, how much more? I’ve scoured the Internet for data on the subject and can’t find any.  If you find some, let me know.

Meanwhile, here in our house, we’ll keep hooves peeled (get it?) for the day an airline unveils an MLP plane. When it happens, people, we’ll book like the wind.

How much extra would you pay for a seat on a themed plane?

Park passes latest addition to Colorado libraries

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"Check-out" this pack!

“Check-out” this pack!

As a staunch advocate of getting kids outside, I was delighted to read news recently about a program at select Colorado libraries through which patrons can check-out 7-day passes to the state’s parks.

The “Check-Out State Parks” program is a partnership between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and eight libraries across the state. The program offers residents the ability to check out one of two seven-day hang-tag park passes (the king that hang on your vehicle’s rearview mirror) at each library.

Each pass comes with a backpack that contains a wildlife viewing guide, a camping guide, a compass, a binoculars, a magnifying glass, and more. There also is general park information, as well as educational activities. (It sounds like the packs are pretty similar to ones I spotted at Spring Mountains National Recreation Area in Nevada, and wrote about in this Expedia Viewfinder post.)

The Colorado passes are good for entrance to all 42 state parks. The passes can be reserved and renewed. The state also is encouraging people who check out the passes to share photos or Tweets from their trip with the hashtag, #CheckOutColorado.

The first eight libraries are part of a pilot program that started Oct. 1 and will run through March 31, 2016. The full program will launch to all 260 libraries in the state April 1, 2016.

Of course programs like this are AMAZING for family travel. They open up the great outdoors to families FOR FREE. What’s more, the educational information in those backpacks can help teach kids lessons about the environment they’ll remember forever. Hopefully my home state of California will adopt a similar program sometime soon.

U-Pick a great vacation activity

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Look out, berries. You have met your match.

Look out, berries. You have met your match.

Few activities enable kids to connect with a new place as well as foraging for produce at U-Pick farms.

The endeavor includes the thrill of the hunt, the immediate satisfaction of watching as your baskets empty, and the delayed happiness of sampling as you go. Also, it’s damn fun. Even under the blazing sun.

Over the course of our travels, we’ve U-Picked in some pretty spectacular places: Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Alaska. Hawaii. Southern California. These days, Powerwoman and I try to find U-Pick farms near our home because we feel the experience is a great way to interact with other locals and get the kids to connect with our local environment.

This past weekend, we hit up a U-Pick program near our house: The one at Shone Farm in Santa Rosa.

Technically, at least on this day, the U-Pick was part of a Fall Festival designed to get people to the property and buy some produce.  The kids didn’t care what it was. They had a blast.

And who can blame them? After getting their faces painted by the front gate, R and L headed into a pumpkin patch to select their own pumpkins, which I cut right off the vine. From there we ventured into different U-Pick territories: beans, tomatoes, and, eventually, strawberries.

Of course this was the main attraction. Each girl took a square plastic pint box and set out to pick ripe strawberries right off the plants. Most of the good ones—those that R didn’t eat—ended up safely in their pint boxes. All others were either left on the plants or tossed aside.

Calling my kids strawberry-obsessed for the latter part of the afternoon would have been an understatement. Between the two of them, they must have eaten 200 strawberries in a five-minute period. They also rose to the challenge of spreading out to maximize coverage; each of the girls brought in quite a bounty.

What’s more, their “hunt,” as L called it, was a riveting topic of discussion for most of the drive home. They debriefed on strategies. They shared best-practices. They lamented the “icky mud” that seemed to get everywhere.

My kids were so wrapped up in recapping their U-Pick experiences that neither of them even realized it when, after the 20-minute drive, we returned to the house.

The takeaway: When it comes to nature, simply getting the kids out will create a lasting impression.

(Of course this time around we also got the benefit of berries. If those aren’t adequate representatives of the “fruits of your labor,” I’m not sure what is or what will be.)

Where are some of the most exotic places you’ve U-picked?

Hilarious look at flying with kids

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Jamie Kaler and clan at 35,000 feet.

Jamie Kaler and clan at 35,000 feet.

As a family travel advocate, I like to focus on the positives of traveling with kids. The fun parts of road trips. The creative strategies of enduring plane travel. The secret ways to have sex with your partner in a hotel room while the kids sleep.

That said, I certainly can appreciate an honest take on some of the (undeniable) challenges of family travel.

This is why I loved a Babble.com essay by actor/comedian Jamie Kaler that was published earlier this week. The piece, titled, “The one rule you must follow when traveling with toddlers,” offers a hilarious perspective on the inherent insanity of flying with kids. Like Kaler himself, the essay is snarf-your-coffee-and-pee-your-pants funny.

Here’s a fun recap of Kaler’s best one-liners in the piece:

  • On kids in general: “To me, kids are like Vegas. You should have to travel ‘to’ them, and you’re not able to stay for more than three days.”
  • On schlepping a bunch of crap to the airport when you travel with kids: “Getting them to the airport is a disaster: 250 pounds of luggage, and only 5 of those pounds are mine. It’s like I’m a personal valet for the babies from Downton Abbey.”
  • On the hardest part of family travel: “[It] is not just the horror of planes, trains, and automobiles, but the constant fear that your kid is going to get hurt. You see, our house is child-proofed; the world is not. And kids are stupid.”

My personal favorite part of the essay is when Kaler talks about the “inevitable” delay at the gate that seems to make time stand still. He writes: “It feels like that moment in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves is dodging bullets in slow mo. Except that every bullet hits you. And it never ends.”

I loved Kaler on “My Boys” back in the day and have enjoyed his stand-up routines over the years. This piece, though—this piece takes the cake. I dare you to read it and keep a straight face. Once you do, and once you clean up the coffee you snarfed (or you change your underpants), use the comments field to tell me what you think he missed.

Inspired to spread the family travel gospel

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FTA Summit crew, September 2015

FTA Summit crew, September 2015

Inspiration is a powerful thing. It’s what lead people to vote for Barack Obama, what has intrigued people about author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and what has compelled people to come together to support Batkid.

As a full-time freelance journalist for the last 18 years, I have spent a whole bunch of my time reporting on other people’s inspiration. Earlier this week, however, as a board member who attended and participated in the first-ever Family Travel Association summit, I was delighted to be the one experiencing the inspiration first-hand.

It wasn’t difficult to be inspired; the summit brought together about 80 of the biggest and boldest thinkers in the world of family travel today. There were experts. There were representatives of big travel companies. There were owners of small travel companies. There were photographers. There were other writers. Almost all of the people present were moms and dads who have traveled with their families.

And everyone descended upon the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch for one reason: To talk about how we can work together to raise awareness of the importance of family travel.

Some people moved me more than others. Like Ida Keiper and Jesemine Jones, the women behind Abeon Travel, a travel consultancy dedicated to assisting families that include children with special needs. And Randy Garfield, the former Disney VP who now devotes his time to the U.S. Travel Association and Project: Time Off, one of the most important research efforts in the history of the American people. And Margo Peyton, who, through her company, Kids Sea Camp, strives to get children travelers SCUBA-certified so they can explore the underwater world. And travel writing icon Wendy Perrin, who’s been writing about family travel forever and simply is flat-out awesome.

And some ideas left an indelible mark on my brain. Like some of the new family travel data from FTA and Expedia. And the “18 Summers” campaign from Idaho (hint: watch the video). And Jim Pickell’s suggestion for a new equation to measure family travel—an equation that compares meaningfulness of experiences to expenditures. (Pickell, the founder of HomeExchange.com, is a pretty neat dude himself.)

Heck, the conference even provided scientific evidence behind the notion that travel makes you smarter; in an intellectually rollicking concluding seminar, Nancy Sathre-Vogel explained how new places and new experiences stimulate the growth of dendrites in our brains.

(Some of us joked that Sathre-Vogel’s presentation provided the basis for a new ad campaign that evokes 1980s anti-drug ads and contrasts a brain to a brain on family travel.)

In short, there was a lot to keep the brain buzzing.

The next step is making it all count. Technically speaking, the FTA’s mission is to “inspire families to travel—and to travel more—while advocating for travel as an essential part of every child’s education.” Now, however, with one summit under our belts, we need to codify a strategy and figure out how and where we want to be. Personally, I’d like to see the group become an information resource for consumers, a networking/best-practices group for industry insiders, and an advocate for the right issues (such as family passenger rights on airplanes).

What about you? What would you demand/expect from a Family Travel Association? What sorts of activities and endeavors do you think the FTA should pursue? Share your opinions and become a part of the discussion.

New data, new look at family travel

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Rainer Jenss inspires the gang at the FTA summit.

Rainer Jenss inspires the gang at the FTA summit.

Today was data day here at the Family Travel Association (FTA) Summit in Emigrant, Montana. That means a couple of my favorite people shared some pretty incredible data about family travel.

The FTA itself was up first, releasing the results of a comprehensive study by the FTA and the NYU School of Professional Studies Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. The study revealed three key data points about family travel:

  • Family travel now accounts for a full one-third of all leisure trips booked in the United States.
  • Survey respondents took an average of 3.53 domestic trips and 1.25 international trips with their children in the past year.
  • Families prefer to travel with their children when the children are between 6 and 12.

Also interesting: the data suggested that there are three distinct types of family travelers: Hassle-free travelers, who prefer travel options that require little effort and research; Cautious travelers, who are more willing to spend time researching their travels and more open to try a wider variety of travel options; and Intrepid travelers, who tend to opt for new destinations each time they travel, are most likely to take the kids out of school for vacations, value travel over material possessions, and like to travel to different cultures and unusual destinations. (If you want to read more about this, Rainer Jenss, who founded the FTA, explained these types beautifully in a recent blog post for the organization’s blog.)

After the FTA’s data came data from Expedia—data that resulted from a separate study and echoed a number of the same points.

The Expedia numbers showed that people who travel with families spend 2.5 times more than couples traveling without them. And that 80 percent of people who take vacations regularly report being happier because of those trips. Other key metrics: 94 percent of respondents take at least one trip with their family per year, and 82 percent said they get more pleasure from vacation than from possessions.

(Expedia also conducted research on what kids think about family travel; that’s worth reading, too.)

What does all of this research tell us the ways families travel? How can we make sense of so many disparate data points? In a market where the vast majority of travelers can’t afford much more than road trips, why should we even care? In a nutshell, the answer is this: BECAUSE WE GO.

The bottom line is that we, as families, travel. In a big way. And we’re traveling more. It doesn’t matter how we travel. It doesn’t matter where we travel. It doesn’t even matter why we feel the need to get away. We’re going. We’re taking our kids. And we’re doing it with increasing frequency—so much so that the trend is on the rise.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past where families were an afterthought on the travel landscape, a customer base that existed but wasn’t big enough to matter. Results from these two studies make it clear that those days are over, that families are becoming a formidable market force which commands attention. The mere existence of the FTA—the very need to have a summit in the first place—is proof of this new reality. Now it’s time for the rest of the travel industry to pay attention.

For consumers, for people like you and me, the message is clear: Keep traveling. As I’ve said a thousand times (including 20 times on this blog), you don’t have to go far from home to expose your children to a brave new world. Family travel is a mindset. It’s time we all embraced this new way of thinking.

Alternative to hotel cots: the Kid-O-Bunk

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The Kid-O-Bunk.

The Kid-O-Bunk.

Hotels have a lot of nerve charging $10 or $15 for cots in which to put the kids on a family vacation. A cheaper and more efficient alternative: the Kid-O-Bunk, from a company named Disc-O-Bed.

In a nutshell, the Kid-O-Bunk is a portable hammock-like bunk bed comprising two separate portable cots that can be stacked on top of each other. The portable cots also can be used separately, or jerry-rigged to form a bench. The $290 travel tool disassembles completely and fit into supplied carry bags. What’s more, the sleeping “decks” are made of machine-washable polyester, which means you can guarantee that the thing is as good as new after each and every use.

To be clear—I haven’t used the thing yet. But I can only imagine how this would change our family trips.

For starters, we wouldn’t have to share beds with the kids, a common occurrence when the four of us travel as a group. Second, we wouldn’t even have to ORDER cots, something we usually do (though, again, the kids rarely spend more than an hour or two in them).

Finally, the Kid-O-Bunk would give everybody—especially the girls—his or her own space, something we often crave when we’re all crammed into a hotel room on a family trip.

The next time we all stay in a hotel we’ll actually be a party of five, making something like the Kid-O-Bunk even more useful. Add this to my Christmas list, y’all. I can’t wait for our kids to experience it for themselves.

Family travel experiences for all

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A family travel hero.

A family travel hero.

A wonderful thing happened today in New York City, when an actor in “The King and I,” on Broadway (at Lincoln Center Theater), spoke up publicly on behalf of a mother who was traveling with a child on the Autism spectrum. The actor’s name: Kelvin Moon Loh.

Kelvin wrote about the incident on his Facebook page, and a friend alerted me to it. Here, in its entirety (and unedited), is his post:

I am angry and sad.

Just got off stage from today’s matinee and yes, something happened. Someone brought their autistic child to the theater.

That being said- this post won’t go the way you think it will.

You think I will admonish that mother for bringing a child who yelped during a quiet moment in the show. You think I will herald an audience that yelled at this mother for bringing their child to the theater. You think that I will have sympathy for my own company whose performances were disturbed from a foreign sound coming from in front of them.

No.

Instead, I ask you- when did we as theater people, performers and audience members become so concerned with our own experience that we lose compassion for others?

The theater to me has always been a way to examine/dissect the human experience and present it back to ourselves. Today, something very real was happening in the seats and, yes, it interrupted the fantasy that was supposed to be this matinee but ultimately theater is created to bring people together, not just for entertainment, but to enhance our lives when we walk out the door again.

It so happened that during “the whipping scene”, a rather intense moment in the second act, a child was heard yelping in the audience. It sounded like terror. Not more than one week earlier, during the same scene, a young girl in the front row- seemingly not autistic screamed and cried loudly and no one said anything then. How is this any different?

His voice pierced the theater. The audience started to rally against the mother and her child to be removed. I heard murmurs of “why would you bring a child like that to the theater?”. This is wrong. Plainly wrong.

Because what you didn’t see was a mother desperately trying to do just that. But her son was not compliant. What they didn’t see was a mother desperately pleading with her child as he gripped the railing refusing- yelping more out of defiance. I could not look away. I wanted to scream and stop the show and say- “EVERYONE RELAX. SHE IS TRYING. CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT SHE IS TRYING???!!!!” I will gladly do the entire performance over again. Refund any ticket because-

For her to bring her child to the theater is brave. You don’t know what her life is like. Perhaps, they have great days where he can sit still and not make much noise because this is a rare occurrence. Perhaps she chooses to no longer live in fear, and refuses to compromise the experience of her child. Maybe she scouted the aisle seat for a very popular show in case such an episode would occur. She paid the same price to see the show as you did for her family. Her plan, as was yours, was to have an enjoyable afternoon at the theater and slowly her worst fears came true.

I leave you with this- Shows that have special performances for autistic audiences should be commended for their efforts to make theater inclusive for all audiences. I believe like Joseph Papp that theater is created for all people. I stand by that and also for once, I am in a show that is completely FAMILY FRIENDLY. The King and I on Broadway is just that- FAMILY FRIENDLY- and that means entire families- with disabilities or not. Not only for special performances but for all performances. A night at the theater is special on any night you get to go.

And no, I don’t care how much you spent on the tickets.

What makes this post so poignant is that Kelvin (follow him on Twitter here) didn’t even know the woman—he just spoke out for what he believed to be just. IMHO, he was 100 percent right. And his argument applies to all forms of family travel activities, not just family-friendly Broadway shows. (For all we know, the mother and her child likely were visiting New York City from somewhere else.)

To echo Kelvin’s point, all families, regardless of their situations or realities, deserve the right to travel and experience new places, people, and things. The more easily we all remember this, the better off we all will be.