Checklist
Ten things worth checking before a family trip
Most of what goes wrong on a family holiday is not bad luck and it is not a bad plan. It is one small fact that was true last year, or true on a different day of the week, and nobody looked.
Kate Sinha, founderUpdated 12 August 20266 min read
This is what we do for a living and it is written out in full, because you can do all of it yourself.
1. The closing day of the place your trip is built around
Every trip has one or two anchors, the things you would be sad to miss. Check those first, on the venue's own site, for the actual date. Weekly closures are the most common way a family day gets destroyed, and they are invisible in a search result that says "open daily" because a listing averaged the week.
Museums and children's attractions close on Mondays and Tuesdays more than anything else. Good restaurants close on the two quietest days, which are usually the same two.
2. Annual closures, the ones nobody finds
Places outside the big attractions shut for weeks at a time: a fortnight in the low season, a refit in February, the whole of a national holiday week. This gets published once a year, on the venue's own page, very often only in the local language, and it almost never reaches the English listing you are reading.
Open the place's own site and run the page through a translator. It takes a minute and it has the best odds of catching something expensive.
3. The last entry time, which is not the closing time
An aquarium that closes at five may stop selling tickets at four and stop letting people in at four fifteen. Arrive at half past four with a tired four year old and you made the drive for nothing. Last entry sits on the same page as the opening hours and is read by almost nobody.
4. The real journey, from the door you actually leave from
A map estimate starts from a point on a map, in the traffic of the moment you ask. Your morning starts at the door of where you are staying, at half past nine, with a car seat to fasten and a pushchair to fold.
Check the route at the hour you would really travel, then add the walk at both ends. On our own builds this is the check that most often changes a plan, in both directions: one museum was promoted to the best day of a trip after the forty minutes everyone quoted turned out to be eighteen from where that family was sleeping.
5. Where you will park, and what time it fills
In beach towns and old city centres the parking is the constraint, not the attraction. Find the actual car park, its price, whether it takes cards, and what time people say it fills. Mid-morning at a weekend is the usual answer, which makes the real choice leaving early or circling for half an hour with everyone hot in the back.
While you are there, check the walk from the car park to the entrance. Nine minutes uphill in the sun is a different day from the one the map suggested.
6. Anything that needs a ticket bought in advance
Timed entry has spread well past the famous landmarks. Check whether the ticket has to exist before you arrive, whether children need one, and whether the free-for-under-fives rule still needs a booked slot. This failure is quiet: you arrive, it is open, and you cannot go in.
7. The gap between famous and suitable
The most recommended thing in a city is recommended by everybody, including everybody without a toddler. Some of those places are wonderful with small children and some are ninety minutes of holding a hand near a drop. Look for the specifics before you commit a morning: stairs, gangways, gravel, whether a pushchair gets round, whether there is anywhere to sit.
A parent group answers this better than any published source. It is worth asking there, and worth asking in a way that gets a useful answer.
8. One wet-weather day, chosen while it is dry
Pick the indoor option for each area you will be in, before you need it. Not a list, one place, with its hours already checked. The reason is not weather planning, it is decision fatigue: at nine in the morning in the rain with two children already dressed, nobody chooses well from scratch, and you end up at whatever is nearest.
9. The afternoon food gap
In a great many countries the kitchen stops at half past two and starts again at seven. That is the exact window a family with young children needs to eat in, and finding out at three o'clock is how a day ends in crisps and a meltdown.
Check whether the places near your afternoons serve continuously, and find the one that does. All-day cafes are the answer and they are worth knowing before you are hungry.
10. Whether the thing you are booking is in season
Whales migrate. Tide pools only exist around a low tide. Ferries drop to a winter timetable. Festivals close the roads you meant to drive. Anything sold as an experience has a season, and the sales page rarely leads with the month it stops being true.
One check on the official source, against your own dates, and you either book it with confidence or spend the morning on something that is actually happening.
The order matters more than the list
If you do three of these, do one, two and four. That is where the expensive mistakes live. Everything after them improves a day rather than saving one.
The method behind all ten is the four checks, and number two has a page of its own, because it is the one people do halfway.
Or have the two hours done for you
A guide is this list applied to your actual trip: every place checked against your dates, every journey timed from where you are staying, delivered within 24 hours. Guides are $99, $179 or $299 depending on how many places you are staying. See the three tiers.