Parents can spend weeks comparing destinations and hotels…
Is Mallorca better with children than Menorca? Is the beach actually walkable with a buggy? Does the hotel have connecting rooms? Is the kids club good? Is the pool heated? Will there be anything on the menu that a four year old recognises as food? By the time the flights are booked, you may know more about a destination you have never visited than the neighbourhood you actually live in.
Then the holiday happens. You visit the beach everyone recommended, have lunch at the restaurant you booked a month ago, take the boat trip, explore the beautiful town and make a heroic attempt at a family photograph in which nobody is complaining.
On the flight home, you ask your child what they liked best.
“The pool.”
Not the Mediterranean. Not the beautiful little fishing village. Not even the boat.
The rectangular hotel pool.
It is one of the great comedy moments of travelling with children, but it also reveals something interesting about family holidays: parents and children can go on exactly the same trip and come home having experienced two completely different holidays.
Adults tend to remember holidays through places. We talk about “that summer in Italy” or “the year we went to Greece.” We remember the hotel, the food, the landscape and, occasionally, how much everything cost.
Children’s memories are often much more random.
Ask them about a holiday and you may hear about the cat that lived outside the apartment, the enormous inflatable flamingo somebody left at the pool, the ice cream shop they visited every evening or the friend they made for three days and never saw again.
The expensive boat trip might disappear entirely from the historical record. The packet of crisps eaten on the beach may achieve legendary status.
This isn’t because children don’t appreciate travel. They simply experience it differently. Adults arrive with expectations, recommendations and a mental list of things worth seeing. Children arrive with almost none of that context. They notice whatever happens to interest them.
Sometimes that is the Colosseum. Sometimes it is a lizard on the pavement outside the Colosseum.
Family travel has always involved logistics, but today’s parents have access to an unprecedented amount of information about how to do it “properly.”
Before booking anything, we can consult hotel reviews, parenting websites, Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps and endless lists of the best family friendly destinations. We can identify the quietest beach, the most child friendly restaurant and the hotel with the best kids club before we have even located our passports.
A lot of this information is genuinely useful. Nobody wants to discover after arrival that the “short walk to the beach” involves a steep hill and 120 steps.
But access to endless information has also created endless opportunities to second guess ourselves. When there are 300 hotels to compare, choosing one can start to feel like a major parenting decision.
Add the cost of travelling as a family and the stakes feel even higher. If you’ve paid for four flights, two rooms and peak season prices, you understandably want the holiday to be good.
This is where family travel can quietly turn into another modern parenting project: something to research, optimise and execute successfully.
One of the quickest ways to understand the difference between adult and child travel is to take a child somewhere described as a “must see.”
Adults love a must see. It reassures us that we are using our holiday correctly. Children are less interested in the concept.
You can take them to one of Europe’s most beautiful beaches and discover that they preferred the less beautiful one from yesterday because it had a better snack bar. You can walk through an extraordinary historic town while answering repeated questions about when you are going back to the hotel. You can book the restaurant everybody recommended and watch your child eat bread for 90 minutes.
There is a useful lesson here. A family holiday does not have to be a children’s holiday, and parents should absolutely visit places they want to see. But expecting children to appreciate a destination according to adult criteria is usually a losing battle.
A seven year old does not care that the restaurant has been featured in three magazines. They care that the waiter gave them an extra scoop of ice cream.
Travel gives children exposure to different languages, foods, landscapes, routines and cultures. It teaches them that the way life works at home is not the only way life can work. Even when they appear completely uninterested in the church, museum, market or village you have brought them to, they are still absorbing the experience of being somewhere unfamiliar.
But children often experience a destination through everyday life rather than sightseeing.
Italy might become the place where they learned to order their own gelato. Portugal might be remembered through mornings at the bakery. Greece might mean jumping into the sea from the same rock every afternoon.
These experiences may look insignificant next to the big attractions adults plan, but they can be the moments that make a destination meaningful to a child.
There is another reason children remember holidays differently: the rules change.
Bedtime becomes negotiable. Breakfast might happen later. Ice cream appears with suspicious frequency. Everyone wears fewer shoes. Parents are not constantly rushing between school, work, activities, homework and dinner.
For many children, that change in rhythm may be more exciting than the destination itself.
Think about your own childhood holidays and the memories that remain. They may involve cousins, card games, late nights, bicycles, swimming, buying sweets with pocket money or being allowed to walk somewhere without an adult for the first time.
Very few of those things required an exceptional hotel.
They required time.
Modern family life is heavily scheduled. School days are structured, weekends fill quickly and extracurricular activities occupy more hours than they once did. Holidays create an unusual stretch of time in which families are together without quite as many obligations.
That can be what children are responding to when they say they loved “the pool.” The pool wasn’t necessarily extraordinary. They simply had three hours to stay in it.
Adults often approach holidays with a scarcity mentality. We have five days, so we need to make the most of them. There are restaurants to try, towns to visit and beaches to discover.
Children tend to approach holidays in exactly the opposite way. They find something they like and immediately want to repeat it.
The same pool. The same beach. The same playground. The same ice cream shop. The same table at breakfast if they can manage it.
For adults, repetition can feel like wasting an opportunity. For children, it creates familiarity. Once they know the hotel, the route to the beach and where the breakfast cereal is kept, they begin to relax into the place.
This may explain why returning to the same destination every summer can be so successful for families. The modern travel industry constantly encourages novelty, but children often love tradition.
The annual return becomes part of childhood itself.
Modern parenting has developed a particular obsession with creating memories.
The phrase “core memory” is everywhere. We are encouraged to take the trip, book the experience and make childhood magical because “they’re only little once.”
There is something lovely about that sentiment. There is also something exhausting about it.
Parents cannot actually decide which moments their children will remember.
You can spend hundreds of euros organising an experience that disappears from their memory within a year. Meanwhile, the evening you gave up on dinner and ate sandwiches on the hotel room floor may be discussed at Christmas for the next decade.
Memory is not particularly respectful of effort or budget. And perhaps that should be reassuring.
A good childhood is not a collection of perfectly executed experiences. Children do not need every summer to be the best summer ever. They need enough time, security and freedom for ordinary experiences to become meaningful.
Parents also have a tendency to judge a holiday according to how smoothly it went. Children don’t always share that standard.
The missed train becomes a story. The rainy day becomes the afternoon everyone played cards. The terrible rental car becomes an ongoing family joke. The restaurant disaster becomes something retold for years.
Obviously, nobody needs to deliberately ruin a holiday for character development. But it is worth remembering that the moments adults experience as failures are not necessarily experienced that way by children.
They did not see the spreadsheet. They don’t know what was supposed to happen.
Sometimes the holiday that went slightly wrong produces much better family stories than the one that ran perfectly to schedule…
There is a tendency in modern parenting to assume that family experiences should be designed primarily around children. But that can make travel unnecessarily limiting.
Parents are allowed to choose a hotel because they like it. They are allowed to book a good restaurant, visit a museum or spend an afternoon somewhere their children would not have selected themselves.
Children do not need to be entertained every minute for a family holiday to be successful.
The better approach may be accepting that different members of the family will enjoy different parts of the same trip.
You can have the beautiful lunch. They can have the pool. Everyone wins.
Perhaps the answer is less complicated than the planning process suggests.
Choose somewhere the adults actually want to visit. Make sure the basic logistics work for the children. Plan a few things worth doing, but don’t turn every day into an itinerary. Leave time to repeat whatever everyone unexpectedly loves.
And don’t panic if the children seem more excited about a €3 ice cream than the experience you spent €300 arranging.
Travel matters. Showing children the world matters. Family time matters.
But the memories that survive are rarely a neat summary of the things we paid for or planned.
Years later, you might remember the hotel, the view and that wonderful restaurant by the sea. Your child might remember that every evening after dinner you walked together to the same little shop for ice cream.
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