Want to travel with your kids but feel overwhelmed? Not sure how to find a family friendly destination? Let me help! Here, I’m sharing 5 ways to find kid friendly travel destinations.
I hear this problem again and again: “I want to plan a family vacation but just don’t know where to go!”
Does that strike a chord?
That’s why I’ve outlined 5 different approaches to choose a spot your whole family will love.
As a quick preview—I’ll cover how to:
- Search google to find kid friendly travel
- Hunt through local tourism publications and parenting magazines
- Read family travel blogs
- Use Instagram hashtags
- Filter by your family’s interests and passions
Ready to get off the fence and pick a family friendly destination? Ready to feel confident about your choice? Read on for the best tips to find kid friendly travel.
***Note: If you’re still feeling like this will take too long, I have just the thing for you! I recently created Vacay in One Day, a step-by-step solution that guides you through picking a place to go—in only an hour. So if you’re short on time and want to skip the stress, check out Vacay in One Day! The small investment is well worth the savings in time and overwhelm.***
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Google “family friendly + [your region]”
Yes, this tip is the most obvious—and your first stop for finding kid friendly travel ideas.
Google will instantly show you lists of kid friendly things to do, places to stay and spots to eat. You can click through the different posts to brainstorm ideas of where to go.
If you don’t start out with specific ideas (like I want to go to Nashville!), you can search by state or region. A search of “family friendly Northeast US” will result in lists of kid friendly travel destinations in the region. So if you don’t have strong opinions on whether you’d like to visit Vermont vs New Hampshire vs Maine, this is a good strategy.
Most of the articles will include options for the entire region, not just one state or city.
(If you feel like this is taking too long, I teach the 5-Minute Search Strategy in Vacay in One Day. You’ll learn how to evaluate if a spot is a good destination for your trip in just 5 minutes!)
Look at local tourism publications and parent magazines
Local tourism boards and bureaus’ sole job is to share what awesome things there are to do in that area. So they’re an excellent place to find information about visiting a city, county, region or state.
If you know a general area where you want to go (like, say, the Southwest USA), you can search “Southwest US tourism board.” Poke around in the site a bit. Are there things your family would want to do? (These sites are often organized by categories like outdoors, cities and events, or by types of places to go like deserts, rivers and mountains.
You can also filter by family friendly destinations and activities. Type “with kids” or another relevant keyword into the search bar.
The same goes for local parenting magazines and publications. These are designed to help parents in a given area have fun with their kids—and hey, that’s what you want to do too!
For example, I’ve written about kid friendly travel for my local parent magazine, PDX Parent. I have shared the best family friendly camping spots around Portland and other travel articles in PDX Parent.
Not sure of your local parent magazine, or the one in the area where you want to travel? Just search “parent magazine + [location]”—it’ll pop right up.
Then see if you can find a “travel” tab or section. If not, use the search bar to hunt for specifics (like day trips or hiking spots).
Read local family travel blogs
Of course I think family travel blogs are a phenomenal resource for finding kid friendly travel ideas! Most family travel blogs have a “destinations” tab, with a drop-down menu of states, regions or even countries. (That’s how mine is organized!)
This is a particularly helpful way to find family friendly destinations because if you’re not sure exactly where you want to go (hence why you’re reading this) but know roughly how far you can travel in the allotted time, you can estimate which states you could travel to.
For example, let’s say I have 5 days for an upcoming vacation. Since I’m in Oregon, I’d figure out how far I could travel. That’s not enough time to drive far—but I could definitely stay in Oregon, go north to Washington, south to Northern California, or even east to Idaho. With only 5 days, I wouldn’t go much farther or else the entire vacation would be driving.
So I could search family travel blogs’ Oregon, Washington, Northern California and Idaho destination bars.
(Sometimes the destinations are organized by region—like Southwest or Pacific Northwest.)
Find kid friendly travel with Instagram hashtags
If you have a destination in mind but aren’t sure if it’s kid friendly, you can poke around on Instagram hashtags to learn more.
In the search bar in Instagram, play around with hashtags. For example, if you were thinking about going to Brooklyn, NY, you could search #brooklynkids, #brooklynfamily and #brooklynmoms.
Not every picture that comes up will be relevant—but you’ll get some ideas of fun things to do.
When you find one of those photos, enlarge it and check out the other hashtags it uses. Click on any that feel relevant—you’ll find even more ideas.
(On the other hand, if nothing looks interesting, then that might not be a good kid friendly destination for your family!)
Remember, if this is still feeling like too much—or you’re simply short on time—I’ll teach you exactly how to pick a place to travel in Vacay in One Day. The step-by-step, fill-in-the-blank process takes only an hour! Click the image below to get it now!
Let your family’s interests guide you
What interests one family won’t necessarily get another excited. So when looking for kid friendly travel destinations, keep your family’s passions in mind.
What do your kids like to do? What are their hobbies? What are they obsessed with?
Lately, Edie and Max are alllll about dinosaurs. Maxine holds her spoon with two fingers, since the quetzalcoatlus has two finger/claws at the point of each wing. My mom got them dinosaur backpacks so they could be like Dino Dana.
So I could use those interests to help us find an amazing family vacation destination for us, not some generic idea of what most-ish kids would like.
Here’s how. First, you can search “[interest] + [state/region].” If I had the same 5 days for a trip as I described above, I could do this search for each of the states we could easily travel to within that time.
For example, “Dinosaur Washington” shows the Burke Museum of Paleontology as well as dinosaur-shaped plant sculptures in Seattle. Those sound cool! Another quick search of “family friendly Seattle” makes it clear we could round out our trip with lots of other fun activities.
That’s how you can use a combination of these strategies to find kid friendly travel ideas to find the just-right vacation for your family.
Tell me: How do you decide where to go on a family vacation? How do you research a trip to make sure it’ll be fun for your kids?
PS – Still not sure where to go? Get my mini-guide Top 10 US Family Vacation Destinations download. It’s 100% free and will definitely inspire you! Click the link or the image below to get yours!
👇👇 Pin these for later so you always have ideas for finding kid friendly travel! 👇👇
