The family holiday is getting bigger — literally. Bookings for multi-generational trips have risen nearly 20 per cent as grandparents, parents and children increasingly travel together, according to adventure operator Backroads, which is building winter programmes around three-generation groups.
Why the Family Holiday Now Spans Three Generations
Operators cite a mix of motives: grandparents funding memory-making trips, working parents outsourcing logistics, and families spread across cities using holidays as reunions. Adventure travel, once seen as a young person’s game, now designs itineraries with grandparents’ e-bikes and children’s shorter routes built in. Our travel pages have more on the season’s family trends.
Backroads’ figure — family bookings up nearly a fifth — comes from a segment the industry calls ‘multigen’, and it is being courted accordingly. Hotels report rising requests for interconnecting rooms and private villas, cruise lines sell family suites at a premium, and tour operators have begun training guides specifically in managing groups whose ages span seventy years.
Winter Break, Reimagined
The trend is reshaping the winter calendar. Rather than defaulting to a beach resort, families are booking active trips — cycling, hiking and cultural tours — where each generation can dial the exertion up or down. Travel advisors report longer planning horizons and bigger group sizes, with villas and small-ship cruises benefiting. Tour operators say the trend is also changing who travels when. Multi-generational groups favour shoulder seasons, when prices drop and crowds thin, which spreads demand across the calendar in a way destinations welcome. Travel insurers have noticed too, bundling policies that cover grandparents’ medical needs and children’s disruptions in a single family product — a small innovation that removes one of the segment’s traditional frictions. Together, these adjustments suggest multigen travel is becoming infrastructure, not novelty.
The economics are attractive for everyone involved. Grandparents frequently anchor the budget, stays run longer, and the trips are often booked to celebrate milestones — seventieth birthdays, retirements, anniversaries — that make them recession-resistant. For destinations, a three-generation group spreads spending across restaurants, activities and retail in a way few other segments match.
What Advisors Are Advising
The practical advice is consistent: book early for adjacent rooms, agree budgets and activity levels before departure, and build in genuine downtime so the oldest and youngest travellers recharge. Industry coverage of the trend is collected by Travel Professional News.
Advisors also warn about the classic failure modes: itineraries pitched at the fittest adult, budgets discussed too late, and no plan for the afternoon the toddler melts down. The successful trips, they say, are designed around the slowest traveller and scheduled with deliberate slack — the opposite of the maximised itineraries younger travellers often prefer.
In a fragmented age, the three-generation holiday is having a moment — part reunion, part adventure, and entirely deliberate.
