Last Updated: March 10, 2023
One of the main hurdles for going on a Family Round-The-World (RTW) Trip with Kids is the actual planning. This in itself is part of the adventure and it can be somewhat overwhelming when you are first starting out, but it’s essentially as simple or complicated as you make it.
Yes there are challenges and it takes a certain amount of perseverance, planning and patience. But it can be surprisingly straight forward once you get over some of the initial hurdles.
One thing we would say from the start is include your kids in the planning as much as possible as they will add a lot of value.
Ours were 2 and 9 when we left and so we had quite different conversations with each of them. But including them in the planning really made them feel an important part of the adventure and the more you include them the more they will embrace travelling.
Other than that, planning a RTW trip as a family with kids isn’t all that different from planning it as solo or a couple. And the method wouldn’t change much from the below even if we were going off without kids.
Sometimes the biggest challenge is just getting going. So we put together this post that outlines how we did it, what we thought we did well and what we thought not so well!
Don’t overthink it!
We really can’t stress this enough. This was one of the major mistake we made on our travel learning curve.
We were reasonably well travelled people before our Round-The-World journey, having already been on travel adventures around various destinations both separately and together.
We’d spent three weeks in Sri Lanka, a month in Thailand and many more, but we had never tackled the magnitude of a two year RTW trip and we let it consume us far too much.
We started looking into RTW flight tickets, researching accommodation, planning what countries to be in when, looking at various festivals and celebrations, we bought a huge world map and tried to plot our journey and sites we would see. I feel exhausted just writing this and thinking back!
Then one day we had an epiphany and came to realise it was not possible for us to plan it this way. We decided we just had to ‘go’, booked a one way flight to India and a couple of nights accommodation and decided we would work out the rest as we went.
We had a rough idea of how we wanted to navigate the world and what regions had better climates in certain times of the year, but other than that we threw the majority of our over detailed plan out of the window.
Now, this plan-as-you-go method is not for everyone. Some people need that comfort and security of knowing when and where they are going and how they are going to do it and the prospect of booking a one way flight with no plan of where you are going is incredibly daunting for some people (and I used to be one of those people).
It also means you will need to take time to plan as you are travelling, taking away some of your time for your actual adventure, which can be a real chore whilst on the go.
But the detailed plan method can quickly turn people away due to the magnitude of it. So if you feel that you are someone who is drowning in the planning, we would advise you to do what we did and decide things on the fly (pun intended), as it is incredibly simple to do it this way.
We all have so many tools and aids at our fingertips nowadays. With Wi-Fi, smartphones, hotel comparison websites, flight comparison websites etc. that you can quite easily book and plan things as you go. Even the majority of less developed countries are online with their train and coach bookings.
Some would argue it can be more expensive if you don’t plan and book in advance and that is true in some areas (for example long haul flights). But generally speaking you make up the cost of not booking in advance with your flexibility. Such as when we were in New Zealand and the date we wanted to the UK was a lot more expensive then a week later, so we stayed in New Zealand an extra week instead (such a hardship!).
So the way we inadvertently ended up planning was a lot simpler then when we first set out. And we broke it down into more achievable goals.
Our Family RTW Trip 8 Point Plan!
So now that we had thrown away our detailed plan we came up with 8 steps that we took one by one to prepare us for the adventure ahead.
And with this method you can actually get to the end goal relatively quickly. Theoretically you could start planning today and leave in just a few weeks!
- Plan a Rough Route
- Sort any Medical Requirements
- Make a Packing List
- Make a Budget
- Book a Flight
- Get Home Life in Order
- Mini-Plan the First Region/Country
- Go!
Plan a Rough Route
You probably already have an idea of the countries and areas you want to hit, it may just be one continent or several, over a few months or years. Deciding your route is one of the hardest bits of the plan, but it is also the most fun!
And the important word here is ‘rough‘. We changed our route countless times as we went, so really don’t think it is necessary to have a detailed route at the beginning. But it’s worth having some idea of what you’re going to do to give you a starting point and an outline to then flesh out as you go.
We decided to write down a list of the countries we were interested in and then bunch them into ‘regions’ to make the plan a bit easier to digest. Ours looked like this;
- India (due to it’s size we made it a ‘region’)
- South East Asia
- Far East
- Australasia
- Latin America
- Middle East
- Africa
Yours may look the same, similar or completely different. But the takeaway here is to just get the route into manageable chunks. And then to add a little detail around the route by thinking about he four points below;
The first thing with any route in any situations is making it logistically feasible and as streamlined as possible.
You don’t want to head to Asia, then Latin America, then back over to Far East for example. So as you can probably guess from the way the list is written above we headed to India first then basically worked our way East-ish.
You can then mini-plan each region/country just before you enter, in the same way, making it as logistically streamlined as possible. So in South East Asia for example you can easily snake through Thailand, then Cambodia, Laos and into Vietnam, without setting foot on a plane.
The second key driver for our route was climate. Some regions are easy-peasy and the climate doesn’t change too much, others have some pretty crazy months of weather.
It will be easier to aim to avoid really drastic weather than to aim to seek out the ‘perfect’ weather in a region or country. So for us we wanted to travel light and not carry any heavy duty clothing, so avoiding cold seasons was key. We didn’t want to end up in New Zealand in winter for example.
If, like most people, you want to stay in warmer weather, a good starting point for a climate plan is to split the regions into Northern and Southern hemisphere, as the seasons are essentially mirrored.
You can then aim to be in the norther hemisphere from around April-Sept and southern from around October-March. It’s not an exact science and you probably wont be able to match it entirely, but it’s a good starting point.
The third thing to consider is any ‘must sees’, particularly time sensitive ones. We were fairly relaxed about this in the end and just decided if we’re in countries when a festival or event is going on then that is just a bonus. We did occasionally change our plan to accommodate certain things if we were close to a region or country when something was going on, but didn’t factor this in at the start of our journey.
If however it has always been your dream to be in Thailand for Songkran, for example, you do obviously need to understand the dates of the event and factor it into your plan so you don’t end up on the other side of the world when it’s going on!
But word of warning, do not go ‘looking’ for must see events. It is very tempting to do this and I remember the excitement of typing ‘best things to do in the world’ into google with an actual real possibility of doing them.
But if you start listing every single festival, event, holiday from every country in the world then you will soon be into a complex plan, which will wear you down.
This is the part of the planning where you will most want to involve your kids. Understand what they really want to see and do and make sure you add it in so they feel a part of the adventure!
And finally you will need to factor in if you have a time limit. You might not and may be planning to just keep travelling forever, on the other hand you may be on a gap year and only have 12 months to do it all in.
So try to aim to not run out of time by having a rough time limit in each area if you need one, factoring the size of each region/country you’re hitting. You can (and probably will) of course change this if you fall in love with a place and want more time there.
We aimed for about a month a country with an overall limit for two years, although we had some flexibility around this.
So after all that, our itinerary looked something like this;
- India: March
- South East Asia: April-August
- Far East: September-October
- Australasia: November
- Latin America: December-May
- UK (Home for a break): June-July
- Middle East: August-September
- Africa: October-March
The above is what we planned and it is quite different to what actually happened as we changed things as we went regularly.
But this gave us a nice blueprint to plan the detail around as we went. And for us, that is all we think we and many others really need, just a rough route, not an overly detailed plan, as, let’s face it, you just never know what’s going to happen.
So our advice, keep it loose and be prepared to rejig regularly.
Sort any Medical Requirements
After you have your rough route sorted (exciting!) you should immediately start to think about your medical requirements and any vaccinations you may want/require.
You should do this as early as possible because some vaccinations require a few jabs and a period lapse between each one, so they can take weeks running into months to get your full course. So you cannot leave this until the last minute.
There are some, such as yellow fever, that are mandatory for some countries others that are recommended and others that you may not need or want. So speak to the experts, but do it sooner rather than later.
Make a Packing List
A family packing list is an essential part of the adventure. What you do and (more importantly) don’t take can have a big impact on the enjoyment of your journey and is something you will want to think about carefully.
We’ve learnt from our mistakes as we’ve travelled and think we now have a good understanding of what we actually need as we travel now. Which is probably a lot less than you may think!
Head to our packing list page for our detailed outline of how we went about this crucial part of the plan!
Make a Budget
Once you know roughly where you’re going to go, how long you’re going to go for and what you’re going to need, then you can start to think about budget.
A lot of this will depend on your personal circumstances. Some people have a wealth of cash and so are able to travel in style throughout, others are on much tighter budgets (as we were).
If you are on a tight budget the good news it is still relatively easy to travel the world without huge amounts of money. You will need some, but there are ways of saving that can keep you going for a long time.
Couch Surfer and Work Away are sites that can make accommodation and sometimes food pretty much free by contributing in some way rather than with cash, and they’re also great ways to get more into authentic experiences when you travel, so win-win. And there are lots of these types of accommodation that are suitable or even aimed at families.
But there are many other variables and costs to think about as well. So you will want to put a lot of time and thought into your budget. You can see a more detailed outline of how we created ours on our RTW family budget page.
Book a Flight
The big question here is are you going to book a round the world flight based on your route, or book fights as you go. For us the latter was the best choice and complimented the plan-as-you-go method.
Some people swear by RTW fights though and believe they are the easiest and most economical method to do a round the world trip. And you can still book RTW flights and keep your overall plan relatively loose, although it will add some rigidness into it. We’re not particularly against them, it just wasn’t for us.
We did look into them and got a quote of around £10k for where we were heading (for all 4 of us), which was what we were roughly expecting. But when we did a bit of modelling and ran a few flights through sky scanner to see prices individually and added them together, we didn’t get to far away from this overall cost.
So for us, we didn’t see much of an advantage of booking all our flights in one go as it would have meant a more rigid plans with less room for change and unprecedented events. And as we didn’t see it saving us that much money, didn’t want to invest £10k all in one go.
But when booking one way flights as you go, you do have to have some forward thinking whilst you’re travelling, as booking long haul flights the day before doesn’t work too well.
But, we’ve found that as long as you start having a look for the long haul flights about a month in advance then you should be alright, obviously the earlier the better though.
You can check regularly and when you see a deal jump on it as you should have the flexibility to do this (it might mean staying in a country for an extra few days for example, but if your saving a few hundred for the sake of a couple of nights accommodation it is obviously worth it). You can also sign up to the price alerts on sky scanner which will alert you when the flight your looking at drops or seems to be rising, again you can then jump on the opportunities when they arise.
Get Home Life in Order
This was actually the most stressful part of the operation before leaving for us. The day we left was a very unpleasant one, and not because we were sad to be going, but because it was absolute chaos and stress!
So ensure you get things sorted well in advance. Again this will all come down to your personal circumstance.
We didn’t own a house at the time for example, so we didn’t have to sell up, we were renting and so that was an easy job of just giving in our notice.
We decided we wanted to get rid of the majority of our possessions, so we sold, donated and recycled as much as we could. We kept a few things that were particularly important sentimentally (mainly for the kids) and they were stored at our parents house. But we essentially got rid of 90% of our stuff. But we really struggled to do it in time, so give yourself lots of time to sort this out and don’t underestimate it like we did!
Get all your finances straight as well before you leave. Cancel any direct debits you won’t use anymore for example, cancel your gym membership if you have one etc.
How you handle your job situation will also be down to you. Some people are lucky enough to be able to take sabbaticals and take a long period off. We decided to just leave our jobs and hand in our resignations. Although I was able to still carry on doing some work for my old employer as I travelled on a freelance basis.
Our kids education was also a key element of the thought process before leaving. We ‘home-educate’ while we travel, but our eldest was in school before we left. It will depend on your home country as to how this works.
In the UK it is a fairly simple process of moving to home-schooling in that you just need to inform the school of your intention to do this and the date you will be leaving the school. It then just comes down to how you then want to educate them. We wanted to continue following the UK curriculum and so we use that as our blueprint for our educating.
Obviously the above all depends on how long you’re going. If you’re only going away for a month maybe keep your house! But if like us you are planning to go away for a long time we would advise cutting as many ties as possible. You really don’t want to have those worries and outgoings when you’re the other side of the world.
Finally enjoy your last few weeks at home. See lots of friends and family, and make sure your kids see their friends a lot as well. It maybe a long time before you see them again so put the effort in.
Mini-Plan the First Region/Country
After the big part of the planning comes some of the detail. We essentially create ‘mini-plans‘ as we go for each region and/or country. We usually do this a couple of weeks before we head to the newest region and a week or so before we head to the next country.
Using all the previous method of looking at logistics, climate, must sees and time limit, but on a mini scale for a region and then a micro scale for each country.
Again, involve your kids in this. Ours get quite excited looking into things to see and do in our next potential country. Our eldest usually does a lot of research and has found some absolute gems in the past. It was him who discovered we could take a boat into natural whirlpools in Japan, something we hadn’t come across in our own research. So without him we would have potentially missed that experience, which was amazing!
There’s also a couple of additional things you will want to check before you head to each new country;
- Entry Requirements – As UK Passport Holders entry and visas are usually pretty straight forward, and this applies to most European, U.S, Canadian and Australian passports. Most can be done online a few days in advance or sometimes on arrival. But just check the requirements before you go on your country’s official website to ensure you’re all ready. As there are some exceptions that are quite complex and need some time, such as the China Visa for example.
- Local Laws and Customs – Just have a quick check to ensure you don’t do anything illegal or offend anyone accidentally when you arrive in the new country!
- Transport – Have a look at the best way to get around and how the transport infrastructure works so you know what to expect and how to book it etc.
- Accommodation – Book yourself a few days accommodation for when you arrive to your first destination in the country. Or depending on your arrival time and if you’re comfortable, just research it and book some when you get there. You can then book as you go to each area of the country.
You obviously need to do this for the first country you are heading to before you leave. Then just keep repeating for the each country in turn as you as you feel your way around the world!
Go!
So that’s it as far as what we did before we headed off. It worked pretty well for us and we love the way we can be very flexible using this plan-as-you-go method, without damaging our budget.
So hopefully this gives you some help if you are planning a family RTW trip with kids, so good luck and get planning!
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