With many millennials staying connected to family longer, they often opt to come along on family trips. We have traveled with our two for years now, here’s what we’ve learned.
The 5 Basics mostly center around content and connections.
- They travel with their own content. They bring with them their favorite entertainment, work, school stuff.
- To support that content, they’ll bring the laptop, smartphone, portable external hard drive for the plethora of snaps and vids. On bag weigh in, they’ll sacrifice clothing for hardware any day.
- Supporting the tech that delivers the content. The question isn’t whether you’ll get places with wifi but if the download speed is acceptable. When we book homes/hotels, we require a speed test photo of the upload/download speeds. We will ask for the rooms with stronger wifi and will nix places that have sucky wifi. I try to justify this by saying the girls are often doing online courses and three of us work online, but we all hate crappy wifi.
- Supporting the connections – Global roaming for their phones. This is becoming a mainstream option on most cell plans, check with your carrier. Texting is necessary when you’re all going different directions in a foreign location. They are also incredibly informed, because any question that breezes into their minds has a concrete answer with a few taps of their fingers.
Dubrovnik, Croatia 
- Freedom. We don’t structure their time. Those days are long gone. They have the option to join us or do their own thing. Everyone does exactly what they want.
Those are the basics to happy travels with your millenns. But if you want to bump it up, here are the next 5 bonus options.
- Unique experiences. Millennials have seen posts about every location and activity from every little-known crevice of the planet. They are bored with the typical and value the uncommon experiences that vary from the herd’s posts. Cultural immersion, authentic food, little-known corners in out of the way countries, are where they are drawn.
Parthenon, Athens - Spontaneous, unitinerated (I made that up) travel. Because you can book a flight and a room from your phone anywhere, you don’t need an itinerary. Millennials seem more comfortable with a block of time and a loose plan of what may happen. Try it as a family–we love it! Whenever we can, it’s our favorite way to travel.
Kings Landing, Dubrovnik - Get far far off the tourist grid, like a crappy 3-4 hour drive on a chicken bus, minimum. Go to a place where people are definitely staring and pointing at you, where all the food is local (duh), and you’re doing a freakish amount of communicating with your hands, hoping you aren’t making a rude hand gesture. Oh yeah, that jaunt you will remember and laugh about until you get another to top it. Do that.
Budapest, Hungary - Connecting. Yes this increasingly rare experience of having a human interaction with 3D people. Whether it’s a cooking class in someone’s kitchen, volunteering to lend a hand building a house, doing a night or two as a homestay in a village–the millennials like connecting.
Provence, France - A smidge of risk. Enough to feel as though you’ve felt the fear and pushed through it to your little victory on the other side. This can be accomplished by four-wheeling it through the rainforest, cave tubing through Hell (that’s a real place in Belize, zip lining through a canopy filled with Howler Monkeys, Italian bumper cars, or simply trying that mystery street meat. But the adrenaline bump is something they keep coming back for.
