The Family Trips We Remember Most Are Rarely the Ones We Expect

I've been doing this long enough to have heard a lot of travel stories. And the ones that come up again and again, the ones people tell with real feeling years later, are rarely the ones you'd predict.

It's almost never the upgrade or the view or the Michelin-starred dinner, though those things are wonderful. It tends to be something smaller. The morning a child spotted a leopard before anyone else in the vehicle. The afternoon it rained and everyone ended up playing cards in a villa and laughing until it hurt. The boat trip that wasn't even planned, suggested by a guide at the last minute, that turned out to be the best afternoon of the whole trip. The time we decided to go and shake a snowy tree but didn’t realise how deep the snow was.

What these moments have in common isn't luck, exactly. It's space. They happen when a trip isn't so packed that there's no room for anything unplanned. When the itinerary has been thought through well enough that the pressure is off and everyone can actually be present.

This is something I think about a lot when I'm designing a trip for a family. It's easy to fill an itinerary. The harder, more important work is knowing what to leave out. A ten year old who's been through four museum visits in three days isn't going to be fully there for the fifth. But give that same child a slower morning, a bit of freedom, the right guide at the right moment, and something might happen that they'll still be talking about when they're thirty.

The best family travel isn't about doing the most. It's about being in the right place, with the right amount of breathing room, and letting the trip do what good travel does.

Those are the vacations they remember.