14 Travel Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Travelling With Kids

Travelling with kids can be so much fun, discovering all the experiences you just can’t have at home. However, it can quickly turn into a stressful ordeal as many parents unintentionally make common mistakes, even when they’re seasoned travellers.

From using the wrong luggage to trying to do everything in one day, or even as simple as not involving your kids. The good news? Most of these pitfalls can be easily avoided. 

What’s in this post? 

In this post we delve into the 14 mistakes to avoid when traveling with kids based on the many, many mistakes we’ve made while travelling on different types of holidays with our own two children. 

We also answer some common questions about traveling with kids including how to prepare and what you can do to make travelling with kids easier. 

If there’s something on this list you’re particularly interested in you can skip straight there by clicking on that section in the contents below. If not, then scroll down to read about mistakes to avoid when travelling with kids. 

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Expecting too much

It’s important to remember that travelling with kids is totally different to travelling on your own as an adult. From keeping them entertained in the airport to

Manage your own expectations for a “perfect holiday”, have some flexibility to change things around, don’t pack out your itinerary to allow for some down time to rest, and remember that they’re tiny humans who probably aren’t going to sit quietly for long periods or be silent in a cathedral.

You can overcome this mistake by brining kid friendly activities, bring plenty of snacks, planning some family-friendly attractions, and cut them (and yourself) a little slack when they act like children! 

Trying to do everything in one day

When planning travel with kids it’s easy to get over excited with your itinerary and think you can do loads in a day, you’ll pack each day out with activities, attractions and places to eat but don’t necessarily think about how long it’s going to take to get around from place to place. I know with our 5 year old a 30 minute walk can take an hour to 90 minutes just because although he starts off well as we get going he starts slowing down.

You can overcome this commonly made travel mistake by planning in more frequent breaks, be realistic about what you can achieve in your itinerary, be clear what things in your itinerary are non-negotiable and what things can be moved or scrapped depending on how to time you are.

Putting all the responsibility on one person 

Travelling with kids is easier when it’s a team sport! How we do it when we travel is one of us (usually me) is responsible for carrying the kids stuff and one of us (usually Luke) is responsible for ensuring we have the right documentation. Then we just split the kids between us so we’ve always got at least one set of eyes on each one them.

This is obviously easier if there’s two of you but not impossible if you’re a travelling single parent – if you have an older child who is responsible enough to keep all the kids stuff safe then use them, if not just give yourself more time by arriving at the airport earlier, preparing your travel documents and packing your bag in a way that’s easy to get to everything. 

Missing a teaching experience

We always use travelling to teach our children about different cultures or how to travel and truly believe that letting them aimlessly follow you around is a waste of a good teaching experience, especially if you travel often. Below are a few ideas to help them learn something new, 

• Finding out which gate you need to get to and how to get there
• Reading a map if your trip involves driving somewhere
• Searching Google to find a suitable activity that is within budget
• Learning some basics in the local language – our go to’s are 1-10, hello, goodbye, please, thank you, yes and no
• Book for you all to do a cooking class that let’s them explore the local cuisine

Booking one hotel room

We’ve been in the position before where we could only afford the most basic room which meant one room with 2 double beds and no additional living space. However, if the option of the room or apartment with a separate living area is an option for you don’t dismiss it if you can afford to splurge the extra cost.

Having a space separate to the bedroom where you can relax, play games or watch TV is invaluable when you have young children that you’re trying to get to sleep or keep asleep! 

Traveling without a pushchair and car seat 

The days are long and you normally do a lot of walking in different areas where no one knows their way around. Don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to get small kids to walk when they’re tired and how stressful it is when they’re little and trying to run around.

This is especially true if your child has just come out of their pushchair – don’t assume that just because you’re fine without it at home that you will be on holiday too. 

Not bringing a go bag

It’s always easier to travel with kids if you’re prepared so make sure you have a bag with some snacks, a drink and things to keep them busy like small travel games, books, colouring or tablets. This will come in handy when you need to wait in a queue or have long periods of travel. 

We LOVE the Hype Backpack, both of our kids have their own one and it’s always the travel bag we use for all of their games and snacks. The reason they’re so great is that they have plenty of pockets, they’re really hard wearing, and have a surprising amount of room. You can pick them up in tons of different styles on Amazon for around £30.

Buying gimmicky child luggage

Those little character suitcases look cute and your child probably loves them but they’re so impractical when travelling and you’re going to end up carrying it anyway!

They’re so awkward for travelling because you can barely fit anything in them, they’re normally an odd shape, and let’s face it, you’re going to end up carrying it anyway so it may as well be comfortable for you! 

Opting for the cheapest flight

Paying less may seem like a great idea but often the cheapest flights have stopovers making them cheap but long! If you haven’t travelled through an airport with kids in tow before, les me tell you – long is never good!

Let’s face it, kids are hard to keep entertained at the best of times but it takes extra effort to navigate an airport with bored kids! Pay that bit extra for the shortest flight and save yourself the airport headache. Of course, on some flights you can’t help but have a stop, like when we flew to Thailand. If you have to book a flight with a layover then here are some tips to getting through a layover with kids,

• Think about how you pack your carry on and what you pack in it – you’ll be unpacking and re-packing your bag a few times on this trip so make sure you’re organised enough for it to not feel stressful.
• Take a walk to stretch their legs and explore the airport, a lot of airports have play areas for kids so you can let them burn off some energy before the second leg of your flight.
• Save a special toy, snack or game for the layover so it’s something different to the activities or food they’ve had during the flight.

Assuming you’ll get seats together

Most airlines will seat children next to at least one of the adults on the booking, however not all do and you can’t guarantee another passenger will be happy to move if you’re not sat with them.

It’s not worth the risk, especially if they’re young so if you’re unsure if the airline will sit you all together you can look on their website, call them to ask or just pay to book your seats. Our kids are still young so I’m pretty confident that we’ll be seated together and so far we always have been, although I have checked a few websites to view their policy before making the decision not to book.

Ignoring your kids interests

It’s their holiday too and it’ll go a lot smoother if you include things that you know they want to do. If they’re older it’s a little easier as you can just ask them but if they’re young they probably won’t really understand but you can take them into consideration when planning your itinerary.

You can overcome this travel mistake by getting them involved in some part of the planning. This can be as simple as not going to a cathedral if you have an energetic and noisy toddler, watching YouTube videos with them about where you’re travelling and taking a note of what they’re interested in, or planning in some parks with play areas or more family focussed activities.

When we went to New York I sat Jacob down in front of a YouTube video and told him to write down everything he liked the look of so I could plan some of it into our itinerary. In Thailand we planned in things we knew they would love, like an elephant sanctuary, snorkelling and going to Carnival Magic in Phuket.

Failing to plan

I’m all for spontaneous travel or backpacking through several countries and that kind of travel is possible with kids, it’s also way more stressful.

If you’re not an experienced traveller and are very confident exploring other countries it’s always better to have some level of planning when you travel. There are three levels of planning but beware – having everything planned isn’t always best as it can be difficult if one small part doesn’t go exactly to plan. At the very minimum you should plan how you’re getting around and where you’re going to stay with your accommodation booked but this is what I do before we travel as a family,

• Accommodation is booked for every night of our travel
• Flights, transfers and in country travel is booked – like our trains when we did a train trip around the North East of the US
• Insurance documents, travel plans and copies of passports are printed and kept in our backpacks
• We book attractions if they’re non-negotiable or look as though they’re filling up fast
• Create a travel itinerary that’s flexible and has plenty of free time and time for rest
• Create a travel plan in Google Maps with attractions, restaurants and parks saved

Forgetting snacks

There’s nothing that keeps a child still and quiet better than food! Make sure you pack plenty of snacks for the journey but keep a few things in mind.

1. Choose things that are going to have as little mess as possible – no one wants chocolate covered hands while strapped into a seat on a plane.
2. Pack a good variety of different snacks to stop your kids from getting bored
3. Look at the restrictions on the country you’re travelling to in case there are food restrictions for the country you’re travelling to.

Forgetting medicine

You know how stressful it is when your kids are ill, now imagine you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, you don’t know where to get medication from or what it’s even called because they all have different names in different countries.

You can overcome this travel mistake by planning a first aid kit that is small enough to be able to easily fit in your case but includes the basics like painkillers for adults and children, plasters and antihistamines as an absolute minimum

I can speak on how stressful this situation is because we experienced it in Spain – a country a didn’t even think about needing to bring medication to because we were there for a week and it’s a couple of hours away, how different would it really be … 

Turns out – very different! One night Finley got a fever that would not go down. He was prone to febrile seizures so we’d packed some infant Calpol but didn’t bring any ibuprofen. We quickly learnt that in Spain you need to go to a pharmacy to get medication like that so had a very long sleepless night topping up his Calpol and hoping he didn’t have a seizure before the pharmacy opened the next morning and we were able to get some ibuprofen to help bring his temperature back down.

FAQs : Family travel mistakes to avoid

Summary: Family travel mistakes to avoid

As I said at the start, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes when travelling with our kids. We never used to even think about taking a first aid kit until we needed paracetamol for Finley in the middle of the night and we were trying to find a local pharmacy open while also trying to understand Greek to figure out what brand we needed to get. 

We’ve tried to pack too much into one day which just led to stressful adults and tired children, and impacted us on the following day too because we were all still exhausted.

Finally, we’ve also fallen into the cute spiderman backpack made for children only to realise we will in fact be carrying it but can’t wear it like a backpack and you really can’t fit anything into it – now we take big backpacks and know that we’re going to carry them. 

While there are many things that can go wrong, taking a little bit of time to research, plan and understand your limitations can help you avoid most of the common pitfalls and mistakes that parents make. 

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