Taking Your Kids On A Work Trip: How To Keep Travel Fun Yet Productive

Taking the kids with you during a business trip can be a great way to combine your professional and personal life. However, anyone thinking of doing so is likely to have quite a few worries about it as well!

After all, if the kids are on the trip with you, how much work are you going to be able to get done? And when you are attending meetings and tapping away on a laptop, will your kids be there in the background bored and frustrated?

If you’re wondering can you bring your family on a work trip, you’re not alone. But you can keep work travel both fun and productive when the kids are in tow. All you need to do is plan ahead carefully! Read on for a few helpful tips on traveling for work with a family.

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Tell Your Kids You’ll Have to Work

Telling your kids you have to work on this trip is the first thing to do before you take the kids with you. You need them to understand that this vacation isn’t just a matter of having fun and getting up to whatever you like. Mommy is going to have to work at some points, and when she is, she would really appreciate no arguments about it!

Of course, this will be a hard conversation to have with very young children, but if you have a 7+ year old who understands adults have to go out to work and earn a living, you’ll be more successful. Let the kids in on the schedule from the start and the trip is likely to go smoother.

Take Another Adult with You

Whether this is your spouse, partner, a friend, or a family member, taking another adult on the trip makes for the perfect midpoint between business travel and a fun family vacation.

Say the kids want to go out and explore Detroit but you need to get this report to that potential new investor within the hour. If there’s another adult on the vacation with you, they can take the kids out now and you can join them later on. So this is a great benefit of bringing your spouse on your business trip as well as the kids.

That way the kids don’t have to wait around, you don’t have to repeatedly be disturbed by their noise in the background, and you definitely don’t have to try and type out essential statistics on your phone while bouncing around on the bus!

Stay in Hotels That Provide Child Friendly Amenities

Some hotels haven’t been built with kids in mind. Avoid these as much as you can; you don’t want the TV in your room to be the only entertainment available to them! Have a good look around for hotels that have an extra amenity or two and see if you can book in there. Having a good hotel makes bringing family to a work conference so much easier.

You want there to be a bit of space for the kids to run, maybe a pool to take a dip in, and hopefully the hotel will have a daycare of some kind! Some hotels even come with games rooms, meaning the kids can have a go on an arcade machine or pick up a board game to bring back to the room.