This article originally appeared in the January issue of
AGENTatHOME magazine. Subscribe
here to receive your free copy each month.
Hi AGENTatHOME readers! My name is Samantha
Davis-Friedman, and I’ve been covering family travel and theme parks for nearly
15 years. I’m very excited to join AGENTatHOME as a columnist, where I’ll be
sharing my tips and tricks for building your family travel business in a new
column called “The Family Plan.” Hopefully, I’ll be able to help you and your
clients plan memorable family adventures for years to come.
My kids are no longer kids — they’re 24 and 27 — but
when they were young, I always made it a point to include an activity or
experience on every family vacation that aligned with their interests. My older
son was a baseball player, so we toured iconic ballparks such as Fenway Park in
Boston and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore. For my younger son (then
an aspiring chef, and now an actual chef), we did food tours in New Orleans,
Seattle and Austin, Texas.
Thanks to the 2025 U.S. Family Travel Survey from the Family
Travel Association (FTA), I’ve learned a lot about a new-to-me term:
“kidfluence,” which refers to the way children are now getting involved in the
entire family vacation-planning process — from what destination to visit and
where to stay to what the family does while traveling.
These ideas are frequently based on ideas kids get online,
and it made me wonder: Would my kids have “kidfluenced” our vacation plans if
they’d had access to social media? (The answer is definitely yes.)
Kids are opinionated, and the notion that they’ll just
happily go along with something that doesn’t interest them is unrealistic; so,
if young family members have ideas for places they want to visit and
suggestions for things they want to do, it seems logical for their input to
influence family travel plans. And the FTA study validates this, with 61% of
parents reporting that involving children in travel planning positively impacts
their happiness and engagement during the trip.
And, now, there’s another trend: “kidcations” (also new to
me). This is a dynamic that not only encourages kids to make suggestions, but
also puts them “at the heart of holiday planning.”
An unhappy child makes a family vacation more challenging
for everyone, so creating kidcations around interactive, immersive experiences
that young ones are invested in is a fast-growing trend.
Now, this doesn’t mean kids have sole decision-making power
— nor should they.
What it does mean is that, rather than planning passive
sightseeing that may not engage younger travelers, nudge your family travel
clients to work with you to seek out activities that match their kids’
interests, as well as local cultural experiences that blend learning with
entertainment. After all, that kidfluence could end up lighting the spark for a
once-in-a-lifetime family vacation.
Do your family clients involve their children in the
travel-planning process? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Reach out to me
at [email protected].
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