Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Travel with Children (How to)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you're a new to traveling with kids, this book provides a good overview. If you've made several trips before, you really don't need this book.

My own personal experience has been flying with kids from NY to Hawaii (10+ hours each way) and from NY to Hong Kong (15+ hours each way). I was hoping for additional tips to make things smoother in flight but there wasn't anything earth shattering here.

The book is broken down into a few key sections:
- Trip Preparation (52 pages, 8 of which is dedicated to air travel specifically)
- On the Road (20 pages on routines while traveling)
- Types of Holidays (21 page overview on camping, resorts, tours, etc)
- Destinations (155 pages on different cities to visit around the world with about 1/2 page dedicated to each city)
- Travel Games (4 pages)

So it's not a "complete resource" as the full book title claims. More than 1/2 of the book is a travel guide of various cities. And each city is only given 1/2 page of coverage. I would suggest buying a few travel books focusing on the cities that you are considering instead. (There are many travel destination books with a focus on kids. And most travel books have at least a small section for kids). I feel this book could have been a lot better if it used the ;ast half of the book for more travel tips rather than an overview of cities around the world.

GOOD POINTS
===========
+ Good overview of air travel with kids (if you've never done it before). Also consider the CARES, Child Aviation Restraint System harness in place of lugging a car seat. You can buy this harness for kids 2+ and it's FAA approved for use in flight. But this wasn't mentioned in the book.
+ Good tips on trip preparation like immunizations, medical kits, etc.

BAD POINTS
==========
- This book is more of a destination guide and each destination is only covered with 1/2 page of information on average.
- Not really needed if you've traveled with kids (successfully) before

SUMMARY
========
I love Lonely Planet guides and this was not the among the best. It's good for an overview for the inexperienced. It is not the "complete resource" that it claims to be.

Summary: An excellent resource for new parents (5 stars) who haven't traveled with small kids before. A decent value for more experienced parents (3 stars). Targeted at the "Lonely Planet" type - those who prefer traveling off the beaten path.

I have to admit I was somewhat jaded when I received this book to review from Amazon Vine - My wife and I have taken two toddlers (including a terrible two) to Taiwan and had three kids five and under to the Virgin Islands, Utah, Puerto Rico, Maine, and on planes more times than we could count. What could this book tell me I hadn't already lived?

For one, more than half the book (~185 of 275 pages) is dedicated to telling you which places are good for given activities (Beach, camping, cities, adventure, etc) while being kid friendly. It also gives a few pages on travel games you can play to keep the kids occupied. There is also advice on older children, up to teenagers.

I admit that much of the advice in he first two sections ("Before you go" and "on the road") seemed very basic, but I expected that given my experience with our kids. There are some good tips on how to address issues like schoolwork while you're away. Very little is rocket science, but it's a thorough resource for covering all the bases.

We have several extensive travel checklists - one for overnight road trips, others for week long trips by plane. A sample checklist for different scenarios would have been a good add.

In fact, I'd recommend anyone traveling with kids adopt this approach - it's not like you can easily go get the right kind of pacifier or lovey at 11 am in a foreign country....

Full disclosure: I received this item through the Amazon "Vine" program

If you've found this review helpful, please let me know!

This is a great buy for a travel-loving family with young children. My husband and I travelled extensively before we had kids but have stayed closer to home (mainly travel within the lower 48 and Canada) since our two kids were born. They are now, 5 and 2 and we're ready to start globe-trotting again but we're a little overwhelmed at travel planning with young kids in mind. This book does a terrific job of outlining all of the planning that needs to be done beforehand regardless of the tyoe of trip you plan on taking - they address road trips, train trips, plane trips, local and international travel, etc. There is a section devoted to travelling with teenagers but the book's true audience are parents with toddlers or elementary school-age children.

In addition to all of the prep and planning in the early parts of the book, the second half goes into great detail on ideas for "destinations" for travel with kids. These chapters are organized by continent and then by country and address all of the major areas of the world with insight into interesting things to do and see that would be great for the whole family. This is by no means a replacement for a guidebook geared to the particular country or region you plan to visit but it's a great starting point to help you decide where to go and what to think about for the travel to and fro and what to plan for while you're there.

When I travel, I usually swear by travel guides. Thanks to the insider information provided by some of them, I've seen truly extraordinary sights in places such as Hawaii and Paris that I would otherwise not have known existed. My general rule of thumb when preparing for a trip is to get myself a good guidebook.

Naturally, I was excited about this one. My husband and I are planning a trip to Europe next summer and we will be taking along a six-year-old and a one-year-old. We have some ideas of things we can do that will be fun for the kids but I was looking for some hidden gems that wouldn't be known to the casual traveler, the kinds of tips that only insiders would know about and that would help us to make this a wonderful trip for the kids.

I eagerly turned to the section on Europe only to find it extremely slim. Apparently, countries like Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland--amongst others--are a total waste of time if you have kids as they are not even covered in the book. Even the countries that are covered--such as France and Italy--consist of little more than some very general information. Thanks to the guidebook, I now know that taking the kids for a gelato in Italy should prove an enjoyable experience for them. I'm sure I would never have thought of this myself. Really, the only thing worthwhile are the hotels named in various regions as that does give me something of an idea of good places to stay with kids. I did also find the bits of information on how people of other cultures respond to kids to be somewhat informative. Still, there is no real insightful information here and I'd venture to say that any parent would deduce that taking their kids to Euro Disney would likely go over well with said children.

The only other part of the book that I found at all useful was the section on travel games. There were some good ideas in there as to games to keep the kids occupied not only while in the car but also while standing in line waiting to enter tourist attractions. I will definitely test some of these suggestions when we are on our trip.

Other than that, there is really nothing to recommend this guide. I'd definitely advise spending your hard-earned dollars on a Frommer's or Fodor's guide. They may not specifically be tailored toward family travel but they offer plenty of insider information that will allow any parent to make a more informed decision about what to see and what to pass up while traveling with the little ones. Not so of this guidebook.

This book was a little disappointing to me. I thought it would be a little more than it was. It touches on a lot of different places and countries so it only has a little bit of info per place. ie. Japan only has two pages. It's nice to thumb thru and maybe you will pickup an interesting fact or two. I enjoyed reading thru it for about 30 minutes after which I probably won't read it again. I think you can gain all of this information and more on the internet. I would save your money and shelf space.

Those who are parents probably know sometimes a vacation with your high energy children is really no vacation. The intense planning beforehand can be cut down with this book. This guide spans suggestions for babies to teenagers. Now if you are a `seasoned parent' the first half of the guide will probably be stuff you already know. But the 2nd half of the book focuses on finding an ideal place to go for a vacation that is kid friendly. The guide lists helpful tips on certain areas, specifically what are the top attractions available for children in each area, which spans different regions: Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Outback, the Middle East and Asia They are divided up into short, easy to read guides that are ~ 3-10 pages suggesting tips and attraction in each country areas like: Great Britain, France .Senegal, Turkey, Greece, Fiji, China, India, Australia, Jordan.

For those who don't want all the planning and want more spontaneity there is a short 2 page section that lists Adventure Tours that do package deals more focused for children. Pricey but then all the work of planning is pretty much done for you and if you are busy and want to enjoy the ride then this option may be the way for you.

However, if you are looking for a book that is comprehensive in an area you want to visit I don't think this guide is for you. It a general guideline to help you plan and decide where you want to go and warns of pitfalls that many parents forget to prepare for. Once you have made your decision (unless you hire a professional tour guide) you will STILL need to buy a separate book for the area you plan to visit if you want to fully appreciate it. That being said, it still feel it is a useful book that has some fresh ideas that are practical if not long on material.

When I ordered this book I was half expecting this travel guide to be like all of the others out there... where to eat, how to travel, where to stay. It is so much more. If you were an avid traveller before kids and you'd like them to be now that they are older (read: looking forward to learning and an communicate with you well) then this is an excellent resource for you. Each section (by place) takes you through the top kid-friendly highlights. The front of the book gives in depth ideas on how to prep for traveling with children, how to prep them, what to remember, and different travel types (seasonal, regional, etc.). Highly recommended to serious travelers that want their kids to enjoy the same learning and experiences of other cultures... or even something close to home.

Travel is an important part of life, but I am the first to acknowledge that travel with children adds a new dimension of drama to the experience. However, the drama can be kept under control with a little bit of preparation and this is where Travel with Children: Your Complete Resource can come in handy. This travel guide wants families to get along and enjoy their vacation to the fullest and it offers many helpful tips and travel ideas to better ensure a relaxing and trouble- free time away from home.

This travel book is a reference guide divided into five main sections with colored tabs on the edges of the pages help assist parents as they search for the correct section of interest. Organization is an important part of any travel guide and this book's organization makes it fairly easy to find exactly what you want. It also helps by indicating web sites, phone numbers, and costs for some of the destinations so that parents can research more and also have an idea of expenses. There are even Traveler's Tales inserted throughout each section (short family vacation stories told by some of the book's contributors) and these serve to give the book a friendlier, more personal dimension.

I like the helpfulness of Travel with Children: Your Complete Resource and it does offer some useful tips on such topics as food and drink, games to play while driving, special considerations when traveling with infants, etc. However, this book is not necessarily the perfect travel companion, like I had hoped. The preparation sections are generally good, even though I question the wisdom of some of the advice, like the recommendation that you use cloth diapers while traveling in order to cut down on environmental waste. What I like least of all is the briefness of two of the sections: Travel Holidays and On the Road; and the great feeling of disappointment after thumbing through the destination part of the book, particularly the section that covers travel in the United States. The section that covers the USA is only ten pages in length and most of the U.S. states are not even mentioned. What is worse is that the attractions highlighted are often not even the best attractions to see. I'm not sure why so little space was dedicated to United States travel. Other destination sections are longer, and that includes places where most people have no travel plans today or likely ever, such as the Middle East.

I agree that traveling with children can present special challenges, and I also agree that these obstacles can easily be prevented or minimized with proper planning. Travel with Children: Your Complete Resource is an acceptable guide for travel with youngsters with some good tips and helpful hints designed to make your vacation as trouble- free as possible. It won't be sufficient for a full vacation experience, due to the briefness of many of its sections, and some of the advice is either questionable or so obvious that many readers will roll their eyes as they read. But this is still a decent guide overall, with some good ideas for vacation travel and some good suggestions for games to play when children get restless.

I'm not a perfect parent or claim to know everything, but I was expecting far more from this book than the obvious (and sometimes incorrect) tips. As stated in other reviews, the book is full of helpful nuggets such as (loosely quoting) "if your child is on formula, be sure to bring bottles and formula with you when you travel." Um. DUH! The craziest part is that they actually suggest that - if you child uses disposable diapers (they call them "nappies") at home - you should bring cloth diapers when you travel because "it is greener and you shouldn't fill up the landfills as a visitor in your vacation spot" (again, loosely quoting). They go on to suggest that you bring pleanty of pastic bags with you to carry around the dirty diapers! Are they nuts? I'm going to tote around a bunch of poo on vacation?!? And how is my kid going to do adjusting to totally different diapers on vacation? The first half of the book is entirely filled with these statements of the absolutely obvious. "Children can feel the cold, so if going somewhere cold bring hats and mittens." If you need to buy a book to tell you that, you have larger problems.

The book also has some assertions that are just plain wrong. I'm quite confident that "all airlines" do not provide bassinnetts on flights or "activity packs" for kids. I wanted to know about bringing a car seat on an airplane (and whether they use the LATCH system) and there was nothing written about that at all.

Also important to note is that the book needs to be translated into English for us Americans. I had to google "nappies" to know what they were talking about - and everything is listed in metric units. There are many examples of this. The whole book talks about "holiday" instead of vacation and "toilet" instead of bathroom. In several parts I think they just plain forgot to edit for grammar.

The sections on different destinations are equally weak. Their valuable suggestion for New York? The Statue of Liberty. Duh. This section is absolutely useless.

Another troubling part is that it seems the book suggests it is just fine to pull your kids out of school to travel, because - although they admit parents have a legal duty to educate their childern - how they choose to do this is up to each parent. That's nuts. Kids should travel on school vacations - disneyland is not a substitute for math class.

Finally, the only reason I did not give this one star, is that at the end there are a couple of pages of "car games" and "waiting games" you can play with your kids. These were vaguely imformative.

Overall, this book is absolutely useless, unless you need it to prop up the short leg of a table.

I want to preface my review as saying that I don't have children (yet).

Then I want to say that after reading this book, I wondered, "Isn't most of this common sense?"

I was disappointed because I was expecting more from the book. As someone who has traveled the world over, I think it would have been better to write books specific to certain places. For example, "Travel with Children To Rome" or "...to Italy", etc, instead of condensing the world into one small book. I'm sorry, but there's got to be more for children to do in Italy than what is described in the book. A general book on traveling with children is sort of like basic parenting. Obvious things like bring lots of games for the kids or don't forget diapers or some such for your child in case they're too tired to remember to use the bathroom. Some sections were hilarious in how they are written, so I have to concede that as someone who is NOT a parent, then perhaps I don't "get it", but I asked several parents, and most of them were amused but also concerned: "You need someone to remind you to bring diapers?" a friend asked me.

Some of the places mentioned are bizarre choices. For example, taking your children to Sardegna because they have beaches. Umm...but do you want to listen to your children complain about the food for the whole time that you're there? Or some other remote and exotic places that your children will probably be too young to appreciate?

When traveling with children, it seems important if not necessary to chose places that not only the parents want to go but also places where the children will enjoy going - otherwise, it just becomes a chore, the children complain and don't enjoy themselves, and then you the parent are left with a headache.

If you get this book, don't have high expectations. It won't solve all your problems. It would have been a better book if the country/places section of the book (the second half) was expanded and more specific. Not your typical awesome Lonely Planet publication.