About Us
Plan Family Trips was started by a mom who loves to travel with the hope of helping other families plan family vacations.
We believe travel is important for kids to experience new places and experiences and to create core family memories!
Our dream is for this website to grow and become a great resource for anyone traveling with kids and teens on any budget.
Our Story:
In 2012, after years of solo and couple traveling, we welcomed twins into our family. We knew we wanted to keep traveling and make great memories with our children, but quickly discovered that the way we used to travel wasn’t going to work. We set out to research and discover the best and most affordable destinations to travel to as a family with children.
We are not full-time travelers – we are a normal family with jobs, kids activities, and school schedules to work around. We are a family of 5 and have to travel on a budget.
After years of sharing our research with family and friends, I decided to create a place for us to share tips, ideas, and itineraries with everyone. Everything in this site comes from our first-hand experience traveling with kids.
We are also gathering itineraries and ideas from other families and would love your help! Submit a travel itinerary your family has used and help other families planning trips and get access to all the itineraries in this site.
FAQ
Good question! I don’t love paywalls either, but this site does cost money and a lot of time to run so we have to have a way to cover those costs. We could place ads all over, but I find those very annoying. We could fill it with affiliate links, but we don’t want to be influenced by who’s offering more money to promote their stuff. We want to recommend what we think is best, regardless of getting paid for it. So that’s why, at least for now, we ask for a membership fee to view our itineraries. Other parts of the site remain free.
We truly appreciate the support when you sign up for an itinerary membership!
You can also help us build our collection of itineraries by submitting an itinerary you have used and you’ll get free access to our itinerary collection for a year! Submit one today >
We have big plans to add vacation ideas and itineraries for many more parts of the world, but we have to start somewhere! We live in the U.S. and are primarily focused on affordable travel with kids, which is why most of our recommendations are for our part of the world. This will change as time goes on! If you have a great vacation idea or itinerary outside of North America, please submit it to us! This will help as we build out this content.
No we do not. We will occasionally use AI to research things, but we have done a lot of tests on AI-generated itineraries and they are never great. Some things AI gets correct (and why it can be useful during research), but the full itineraries have major flaws or would be terrible with kids, or have too much packed into them.
All of our itineraries are field-tested and used by real families.
If you submit an itinerary, we ask that you only submit itineraries that you have actually used. We can tell when it’s straight from AI, and our users can tell too!