Why doesn't every family have a holiday?

I was having a conversation with my colleague Janet about guide dogs. Bear with me, it’s coming back around.

We’d both been up at the crack of dawn to bags a cheering space for the London Marathon and we had a bit of time to kill before it all kicked off. I’d seen a story about a dog who’d fathered over 300 guide dogs in a long career and there was footage of the puppies being placed with owners for their first year before they went off to do their training.

It got me thinking. Dogs don’t live as long as people so anyone who has a guide dog is going to feel its loss at some point. Don’t judge me, we never had pets when I was a kid, so this was new news to me. I thought about how devastating that might be. The loss of the trusted companion, the interruption to independence. From a clear blue sky, I was putting myself in the position of someone else, whose reality I had never given a second thought.

Whether what I imagined was right or wrong, my mind was open to what might be different.

We all do that. We know our lives, the characteristics that give them shape and form, the countless daily moments of frustration, the balls we juggle. We don’t have the brain space to think about someone else’s reality and how it might be different from our own. Its quicker and easier to apply the shorthand. We’re all broadly the same, aren’t we?

The trouble is we’re not. We might share some characteristics but many more we don’t. And here’s where it made me think about what we do at Family Holiday Charity. Told you it’d come back around.

When I say the word family, I’m betting that the image in your head is a mum, dad and a couple of kids; all able bodied, affluent and loving life. Is that what your family looks like?

It’s a concept so drilled into us that even if it bears no resemblance to our own family that’s still the mental image the word conjures. But if you stop and give it a bit of thought, you know that very few families actually look like that. ?

Each one is unique and so are the people in it. Each has its own needs in a million different combinations so if most holidays are designed for that normative idea of two adults and two children, trying to have a holiday when your family isn’t like that is the proverbial square peg/round hole situation.

Just think about trying to have your family holiday in a typical hotel. Usually, one or maybe two children under twelve can sleep in a room with their parents, so it’s just about doable. Once they are over twelve, or you have more than two of them, things become trickier. Connecting rooms? That’s double the price and a worry. Do the adults sleep one in each room to supervise the kids? And if there is only one adult how does that work?

OK then a cottage or a caravan might work instead, they have lots of sizes of accommodation. You’re probably looking at an out-of-town location so if you don’t have a car getting there is going to be challenging. And since it’ll likely be self-catering, you’d have to eat out for every meal or factor in there being a shop nearby where the prices are reasonable.

Just thinking about two characteristics, how big your family is and whether you have a car, starts to show us that getting time away together is not the same for every family.

But the real experts in the things that get in the way of a family holiday are families themselves. So, we asked them so we could find out if there was more we could do to help.

Cost is an obvious factor, particularly for families with school aged children who have to travel during the peak period where demand sees prices often more than double.

Time off work is a consideration too, with some adults not given leave at the same time as their children were off school.

Transport, with access to a car, or availability and cost of public transport from where you live to where you want to go has a big impact on what’s possible for a family. Travel time was also a consideration, especially for those with young children who might be less able to cope with a long journey.

Family size and make up plays a huge role. The bigger the family the more it costs, the less choice you have, and the more of an undertaking the whole thing is. Even practical things about the booking process like online drop-down lists for the number of guests not going up to enough people and it being hard to find an alternative route to book are getting in the way.

If you’ve not done it before, or you’ve not done it as a family, lack of confidence can be a major barrier, even if practical considerations aren’t. Knowing where to start and getting the right support throughout the process was something families mentioned a lot.

And the thing that made me saddest was hearing from families who had children with neurodivergence about the huge amount of social pressure they felt and how this created a barrier to them having a holiday. Being judged by others, both staff and holidaymakers, when their child was triggered in public, and concern about their child upsetting people meant they just wouldn’t risk a holiday to protect their children from a negative experience.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Look some of these challenges are not easy to solve. They’re big picture, complex systems stuff.

But some of them, lots of them, fall easily into the category of ‘not that tricky but requires a bit of thought’.

If employers, product designers, developers, trainers, actually all of us, stopped thinking on the basis of that shorthand picture of a family, and opened our hearts and minds to a more complicated but no less beautiful picture, it would be a great place to start.

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There’s loads more insight in the report from our research with families, and lots of positive thinking about what could be done to make it easier for all families to have time away together. Give it a read here.