How Families Plan Their Outings


Te travel industry keeps a tight focus on Mom, because study after study indicates that women make about 85% of travel decisions. What many people forget, though, is that women aren’t necessarily choosing what they want. Tey tend to be altruists, taking their partners into account, and above all, listening to their kids.


In our study, 70% of families said that their kids help plan their trips. A full 13% of parents said the initial choice of what attraction to visit was made by their child. In 37% of families, the child may have not been the sole instigator, but he or she played a major role in the decision to visit.


Some families are dictatorships, with the grown-ups making all of the decisions. Asked what they do to encourage their child to visit an educational attraction, for example, 37% of parents said they simply insist the child go along. In other families, it’s the child’s power that’s absolute. 24% of families said that if their child did not want to visit an educational attraction, they simply would not go. Perhaps most interesting, in situations where a child balked at visiting, 39% of parents sweetened the deal with some kind of “trade-off.” We call this “arbitration.”


In our study, we identified several models for how children are involved:


1. CHECKS AND BALANCES: Sometimes, for practical reasons, the children’s power must be limited by certain realities – budget, logistics, available time, etc.


2. CONSENSUS: In this model, families talk through every decision and get creative finding ways to make everybody happy. It’s as collaborative as life gets.


3. DEMOCRACY: Everybody gets an equal vote, and majority rules. It can be bluntly egalitarian, with the six-year old vote just as important as Dad’s.


4. MERITOCRACY: In this model, kids’ roles expand with their age and knowledge of the world. As toddlers, they wield scant influence; by the time they’ve reached their teens, they’re making most of the choices.


5. APPRENTICESHIP: Travel is a training ground, with parents actively teaching children how to research a decision, work from a budget, and make arrangements.


6. ARBITRATION: Nearly every family resorts to this at some point, and just about everything can be negotiated: where to eat, how much to spend, which souvenir to buy.


PARENTS OFFERED TRADE-OFF FOR EDUCATIONAL VISIT


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