Going on a family holiday together can be a joyous, memorable experience and a great way to spend your time off from work. During our impressionable years when we’re younger, holidays memories are precious things that we carry with us with great fondness into our adult years.
However, don’t lose sight of the fact that planning is always crucial to enjoying fantastic family trips away. A city break to the capital may be precisely what you and your family need right now. Discover more by reading this guide that we have come up with top tips on how to plan fun family trips to London.
Consider Places You Can Visit That Everyone Will Enjoy
You may all have quite different personalities, and various family members may have conflicting ideas about what makes family trips fun and exciting. For instance, one of you may love looking around haunted historic mansions and getting spooked out, but that could also be another family member’s worst nightmare.
Visiting the city of London, you will be fortunate enough to have a wide range of different fun family activities at your disposal nearby. London is home to many top-quality restaurants, art galleries, museums, beautiful parks and gardens, stunning buildings, sports venues where you can watch live sports in the flesh, as well as plenty of other things to do for tourists. Remember to consult with your family members by running your trip ideas past them before booking, and bear in mind that planning family holidays always tend to require a fair bit of compromise.
Think Outside the Box
When deciding on where you’d are going to visit in London as a family, try and think a little outside the box by not only considering visiting the most popular world-famous tourist hotspots in the capital. One negative aspect of going to the typically most popular tourist attractions in London with your family, such as the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, the Tate Gallery, and Maddam Tussauds, is that the crowds can be overwhelming. Visiting packed tourist landmarks always requires you to exhibit patience, as you can spend time waiting in queues.
Do you want to visit a unique Arthouse that is home to intriguing masterpieces by iconic modern artists yet has more reasonable levels of tourists? Then going to see exhibitions available at a Private Art Gallery in London, such as Woodbury House Arthouse in Soho, could be the perfect choice for you. This amazing gallery could be an excellent idea for a fun family trip in London, so check out their list of exhibitions to see if anything would be suitable for you and your family. If you don’t think your kids would be interested, then this could be somewhere you and your partner visit whilst the kids are off to a more kid-focused environment.
If You are Going on Holiday With Younger Children, Remember They Have Shorter Attention Spans
Remember that young kids often tend to have much shorter attention spans than adults do, and you may want to avoid your young kids having tantrums around London all day. If you’ve got little ones, try and plan your day around them. What will grasp their attention? How long do you think they will be able to sit still and concentrate? For instance, most small children would really struggle to sit quietly through a Shakespeare play that goes on five whole hours, for example.
Picking interactive activities is also a great way to get your kids attention and keep their minds engaged. So, try and look out for tourist activities where your kids can do things like drawing or following interactive maps.
Try and Find Suitable Accommodation
As a general rule, hotels, bed and breakfasts, are usually more expensive the closer they are to central London. So, a wise idea could be to pick accommodation that is a bit outside the centre, and you could save a lot of money by booking a hotel in an area like Wembley or Brentford. However, staying in a hotel in a less central part of the city will, of course, mean that you then have to travel into London to see the sights.
When booking accommodation for your family trip, think hard about what your kids may like. What room arrangements will suit them? It’s also wise to look through online customer reviews of feedback from other people who have stayed at the accommodation. You could also book accommodation near to stations such as The Chilworth London Paddington Hotel so it’s easy to get around.
Consider Physical Activities That Will Help You All Burn Energy
Kids often become restless when they haven’t been able to run about much during the daytime and have not had an opportunity to burn off some of their abundant energy. Kids who haven’t done enough exercise during the day often encounter real difficulties sleeping at night-time. Having to travel around with children with a significant lack of sleep certainly doesn’t seem conducive to the idea of a fun, enjoyable holiday experience.
So, when planning what you’re going to do in your family holiday, consider physical activities that will help your kids burn off some energy. What about going to a nice big public park in London where they can run around freely as you keep an eye on them? Why not visit a fun-filled kids’ playground with loads of exciting equipment? You can even decide to visit a farm in London with your kids. Although it may seem somewhat bizarre in a large city with 9 million people, there are various children’s farms in London, such as the Mudchute Park and Farm on the Isle of Dogs, and the Hackney City Farm Yard in Haggerston Park, Hackney. You may also feel like stretching your legs and burning off some energy yourself at some point during the day to help you sleep better at night.
Plan How You Will Travel Around London
As anyone who has ever lived in London will reiterate to you, driving your car in London is always a nightmare. Driving in London can be extremely challenging due to the Congestion Charge, introduced in February 2003 to help reduce the city’s pollution levels. The charge means you have to pay £15 whenever you drive within the Congestion Charge zone between 7 am and 10 pm, so it’s something you want to avoid having to pay for as much as you can.
Fortunately, the fact that London has an extensive public transport system enables you to plan your fun family trip without needing to use a car. Instead of standing still in your vehicle in traffic, plan how you will navigate the city and see different sights by taking the iconic underground ‘tube’, overground trains, and buses. If your plans change and you need to get somewhere quickly across the city without much warning, or there are delays or cancellations on public transport, you may need to take a taxi. Are you planning on visiting a particular landmark together? Then it’s a good idea to look up where the nearest public transport stations are, and how far you may need to walk.
Looking up transport routes may seem a bit mundane and uninteresting. Still, anyone intent on planning a successful family trip in a large size city such as London should be aware of the importance of getting your transport plans right. Fun city breaks with your family ought to be all about enjoying yourselves and seeing as many cool things as you can in the time you have there. Sorting out the transport arrangement beforehand will mean you are able to get around quickly and discover the many wonders of London.
