travel guide: the baby & toddler edition
a complete resource for travel with kids, including gear must haves, planning tips, and your FAQs.
When my husband and I became parents, one of my biggest priorities was making sure we didn’t lose the things that make us who we are. From the start, we wanted to build a life with our child that aligned with our values – not one where travel (and the outdoors!) took a backseat.
We leaned in early to figure out how to make it work with a little on. Our first trip - a test run to a cabin on Whidbey Island- happened when he was just a month old. Since then, we’ve taken him to the beach, on hikes, camping, and across the country to visit family (perils of being the long distance daughter). Now, at two years old, it’s been a privilege and a *journey* to have taken him on more than 20 flights, and to have recently returned from his first international trip.
I read once that traveling with kids is like “coaching an away game” - same rules, completely new environment. And honestly? That’s exactly it. It’s many of the same challenges and joys of parenthood, just with a different backdrop. But it’s also a joy to keep living the life we love with the added gift of perspective as we watch him experience new places, while we grow as parents and people.
Through trail, error, and several time zone mishaps, I’ve learned a lot about what works, what’s worth packing, and how to make travel with little ones feel manageable – and even fun. This guide gathers all that experience, plus answers to your most common questions.
More than anything, I want to push back against the endless “just wait” warnings – the idea that everything you love becomes impossible once you have kids. What I’ve learned over the past two years and change is that parenting is mostly doing things you’ve done a million times before, for the first time. While some things are decidedly harder, the outcomes and experiences feel richer and more complex as a result. Traveling with our little guy has deepened our experiences, pushed me outside my comfort zone, simplified my priorities and reminded me that we are endlessly adaptable.
This post includes tips and tricks for: ;
Planning: major considerations for different age ranges, including destinations, transit, accommodations and activities.
Packing & Gear: my must haves, tips for packing, and things to avoid
In-transit tips to make flights and car rides manageable
Answering your FAQS about schedules, managing new environments, making logistics work and choosing international destinations.
I can’t wait to see where we (all) go next.
Xx,
As with some of my other guides, this one is a bit long. I recommend viewing the browser version — it’s prettier, and easier to navigate.
Looking for more? Check out the full archive of travel content, packed with highly researched guides, itineraries and tips for every kind of experience.
PLANNING:
Before you even board the plane, there is a ton to consider when it comes down to planning destinations, transit, accommodations and activities that change quite a bit depending on the age of your little one:
0 to 6 Months:
I’m going to make a bold claim that this is the easiest time to travel with littles, because they are endlessly portable, sleep a lot, and aren’t particularly mobile (and thus are easier to manage in confined spaces like planes and cars) The biggest considerations are frequent feedings, and unregulated or unpredictable sleep schedules.
Destinations: any and all. As I say to any new mom friends; if you’re going to be sleep deprived on maternity leave, it might as well be somewhere warm and interesting. This is the least awake and the least opinionated your child will probably ever be! We took our little one to Whidbey Island, Kauai, Los Angeles and the family lake in Minnesota before he was six months old – I wish we had been braver and made it somewhere like Copenhagen.
Transit Tips: I firmly believe this is the easiest age for longer flights; Kiddos under six months can comfortably be infants in arms without their own seats, and most struggles can be easily ameliorated with nursing, a bottle or a walk up and down the isles in a carrier. Long road trips are a little trickier, but we found that timing the start of a drive around nap time helped get down the road before needing to stop to feed or change.
Accommodations: Highly recommend choosing lodging with a separate space for naps so you and your partner aren’t trapped trying to whisper in the dark. If you’re pumping or using formula, consider a spot with a kitchenette or kitchen to make cleaning and preparing everything easier (so you aren’t trying to sterilize things in the bathroom sink!)
Activities: The world is your oyster, and mostly your biggest consideration is time of year and weather to avoid little ones being too hot / in too much sun, or too cold. From hiking in Kauai to cozy cabin stays, we focused on balancing adventure with downtime – (tummy time, play time) to keep things from going off the rails. Because they have so many naps at this age, we usually aimed to have at least one in the car on a longer drive or at the accommodations in his pack and play, otherwise we did great with naps out and about in the stroller or carrier.
6 to 12 months:
Kiddos here are becoming more alert and interactive, and likely have a more set nap schedule with longer awake periods. They are often beginning to sit up, crawl, and might be headed towards walking, and starting solids, but they are still quite portable and can still be easily carried. These kiddos will want more entertainment, and might require both more stuff (teethers, toys, books, etc) and kid-proofed spaces in your lodging for safety and peace of mind.
Destinations: Our first summer with a baby included a mixed bag with flights to the Midwest , LA, and multiple camping and backpacking trips in Washington State.
Transit Tips: If you haven’t already, now’s the time to consider a separate plane seat. We found that our little one slept much better in his car seat than in our arms or a carrier, especially as he got stronger, more wiggly and had longer wake windows. Especially if your flight is longer than two hours: book that seat.
Accommodations: Highly recommend choosing a hotel or rental with a kitchen to make solids easier and keep you from having to try to do every single meal out – that’s not only expensive but also fairly taxing on everyone involved.
Activities: Very similar to 0-6M. In our experience, this is still a great age for fairly easy travel. The biggest tip is just that if your little one is stroller or car seat bound for long stretches, schedule time for crawling or active play before outings. Otherwise, we continued to do all our regular activities, but started to bring along more toys and books to entertain during dinners or while out and about
12 to 18 months:
Welcome to the high-energy, high-motion phase where travel gets trickier but also more rewarding. Kiddos are more mobile, with short attention spans that require frequent changes in activities. Nap schedules often shift to one longer nap in the middle of the day. Interactive toys, books, snacks and sippy cups are a must, as are kid-proofed locations.
Destinations: This is about the age we started really feeling a difference about traveling with kids. Expect more movement and shorter attention spans - long haul travel takes more patients. Once you arrive, the need for child-proofing gets emergent, and the itineraries without any dedicated downtime feel downright impossible. But our little guy traveled a TON in this time period (Whistler, Park City, the big Island, Ohio for a solar eclipse, Albuquerque, the lake in Minnesota) and it was amazing to see how much he engaged with each destination.
Transit Tips: Don’t count on in-flight naps anymore – this is when tag-teaming makes a huge difference. We started doing “shifts” where one parent would be on for an hour or so until the other would swap in – this kept us from wondering who was supposed to be in charge and made sure we each got some downtime to eat, scroll, and generally decompress until our shift rolled around.
Accommodations: At this stage, a single hotel room started feeling impossible. We almost exclusively did home rentals with multiple rooms and outdoor spaces (clutch) or hotels with a junior suite and a kitchenette that gave us space to cook, eat, shower, relax without waking the little guy in the morning or during nap. It’s more expensive, but it’s worth it.
Activities: This is when kids start truly engaging – beach days, aquariums, and playing in the snow become favorites. This is also around the time we started shifting schedules and itineraries to accommodate these more kid specific activities, rather than just nap times.
18 to 24 Months+
In this time period, our little one turned into a whole independent, totally mobile person (complete with his own opinions and the ability to voice them, loudly) - in terms of travel things got harder but also way more fun. This was the phase where we actually felt like we were traveling with our child, and experiencing our destinations together, rather than just carting him along for the ride. That means planning out more kid-friendly activities, and incorporating breaks into the itinerary for things like playgrounds or unstructured play time. It also will impact your dining plans – while we’ve worked hard for our toddler to be comfortable and generally well behaved at a restaurant, eating out every meal for 4-5 days is a lot and we like to consider how to make this easier for all of us.
Destinations: We’ve never skipped a destination due to having a toddler, but this is the age where we noticed how much easier it is to travel with infants than with opinionated, fully mobile toddlers.
Transit Tips: This is, frankly, the hardest travel age. However your baby traveled before means nothing now. Pack patience, shacks, and expect chaos – but it’ll be worth it.
Accommodations: As above: if you’re in a hotel stick with adjoining rooms or a small suite with a bedroom, living room and kitchenette, or a small home rental that gives you space for unstructured play and to have space during naptime or after bedtime. At this age, extra space is non-negotiable for a smoother trip.
Activities: Activities at this age depend a lot on what kind of trip you’re on. We did a mix of family travel (lots of family / cousin time at someone's home) and personal travel (our trip to London and Paris and a short ski trip). Whether it was playgrounds in London or sledding around in Whistler, make sure to balance sightseeing with toddler friendly play. (more tips on that in this post!)
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