Family Travel Grows Up

Touring en famille has moved beyond theme parks and fast food to the far-flung and michelin-starred. Here's how to go the distance in style with your brood on board

It's no longer automatic that a vacation with the kids means a week in Waikiki or four days at Disney. Increasingly, parents are figuring out how to bring the family along on trips to explore the world in all its complex glory—a nautical tour of the Galápagos, a journey into the Egyptian desert, a stately sojourn in the English countryside, stepping lightly through Beijing's Forbidden City.

Condé Nast Traveler salutes the trend: Families that feel at home abroad raise children to have a global outlook. Here, we collect perspectives from travelers with very different styles—none of whom would dream of leaving the children behind.

In the Lap of Luxury
Gully Wells prefers swanning through Europe with chicks in tow

As a child, I was exposed at an impressionable age to the allure of European luxe. I remember having lunch with my father at the Crillon in Paris before I could read a menu, and I sailed from New York to Southampton before I could scrawl my name in a passport. As a consequence, I developed a taste for such things, which I somehow managed to indulge over the years… until I found myself the mother of a baby girl. Now, there are people (mostly women, I hate to admit) who take sadistic delight in telling you that as soon as you have children, you can say good-bye to everything that was most fun in your pre-baby life. In my case, this entailed quite a lengthy list of pastimes, with traveling to Europe in some degree of style pretty near the top. And this certainly wasn't something I was ready to give up anytime soon.

The first thing to take into account when planning a trip with small children is that some of the hotels you might want to stay in do not accept guests under the age of 12. Well, that's their loss, and, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, why would you want to stay in a place that didn't want your kids? There are plenty of equally pleasing hotels that will welcome you, your children, and your dollars with open arms. But even these establishments do have their limits, so in order for everybody to be happy—and that does include the staff and other guests as well as you and your family—you need to follow a few basic rules.

A bored child is never a fun traveling companion. So from a purely selfish point of view, you want to make sure you have an endless supply of age-appropriate tricks up your sleeve (or more likely in your bag or their backpacks) to keep the dreaded boredom at bay. I remember going to Paris once to write a story about a three-star Michelin chef and taking along Alexander, my then 5-year-old son, and Rebecca, his then 15-year-old sister. Paris was not a problem—he was happy in any old playground, and she fell in love with the Musée Rodin—but once we sat down in the temple of gastronomy for the ten-course tasting menu, he began to squirm. Monsieur did not care for undercooked pigeon in Moroccan spices or fish with fennel and sad eyes, but on the other hand, he was quite happy to spend the next four hours munching on bread and butter, as long as it came with a side order of… Game Boy—or "Jeu Garçon," as we preferred to call it.