Traveling with Teens to Europe: Successful Vacation Planning Tips
We saw so many families visiting Rome over the Easter holiday weekend! Rome, Italy. April 22, 2022.
In the teen years, peers and friends are much more the focal point than parents and family. And family activities—including vacations to what could seem like dream continents to anyone on the planet, like Europe—must compete with the magnetic pull of smartphones and other devices.
While destination spots always have activities to entice the youngest members of the family, with theme parks featuring rides and characters through to museums and special exhibits and expositions, the catering ends after early adolescence. Parents must muddle through on their own with often recalcitrant, moody offspring.
Right when you think they might be old enough to appreciate a trip farther from home.
Fortunately, there are a few travel tricks for trips to Europe to ensure that the teens among you have an awesome time that they can enjoy in the moment—and remember long after they get home.
Serve as Travel Agent
If your teen has never visited Europe and has only studied Europe broadly in school, you won’t get far in asking what they’d like to do on the trip. How should they know what they would like to see, do, or eat when they don’t know the place or the options?
Sure, you could tell them to do some research and propose some ideas, but if you’re reading this article, you likely have a teenager in the house. You know that most teenagers will not comply with this request.
Asking—even several times—will only cause you both frustration.
Instead, use your knowledge and resources and trip-planning experience to plan the trip. Angle to find activities and places that will most interest and excite your teen. Where you can, have one or two options for different days or moments so that they can pick the one they’d enjoy.
With your trip plan sketched, share the draft program with your teen. I know someone who puts together quick slide presentations for building anticipation and helping to finalize plans with the family. (Might be overkill, but they enjoy it.) Let your teen and the rest of the family weigh in. Listen if they express particular interest or disinterest in one or another set of activities. If you have options for certain moments, present them during this outlining session and go with whatever they choose to give them involvement and agency in the trip’s development.
Small kids may not need more of a heads up than a day or two before an activity, but older people need more time to process and anticipate—and they prefer to give feedback and help make choices based on offered options, too.
Lean toward Multifaceted Experiences over History Lessons
When planning a trip to Europe with teenagers—and probably even for many adults—focus on experiences over straight-up, back-to-back history lessons, architecture reviews, and site visits.
Experiences can still teach you a lot about a place, its history, and its culture. In fact, in many cases, experiences do this better than staring at a landmark for a while and then moving on to the next one.
What do I mean by “experiences?” Experiences during travel can include activities around regional foods and drinks, classes teaching local or regional crafts and activities, shopping trips with local experts—and beyond. A few quick ideas to get you brainstorming:
Find a class to teach you how to cook a regional delicacy, like the chocolate-making class we took from a local chocolatier in Avignon. Italy, for another example, has numerous classes for making pasta and pizza.
Get a guide to take your teen on a visit to the town’s shopping treasures. Milan, Paris, and Rome have guides who specialize in taking people to the great shops and finding deals and creative looks.
Every town and city offers food tours. Teenagers (and adults alike) love them! On these tours, you’ll get an overview of the region’s best food and the reason it’s a local delicacy and you get to taste many of the different foods and drinks, too.
Courses abound that show you how to create local specialties or use local materials, including classes on weaving, sewing, painting, and drawing.
Similarly, try one of the many local-area ateliers, farms, and artisans offering experiences that allow people to simply observe or to work alongside them for a day or part of a day—often including a meal or drink together—to get a glimpse of a local specialty or activity.
Search for walking tours themed around specific subjects, such as ghost tours (London has many of these), the French Revolution (you can’t miss doing one of these in Paris), or stories about the emperors that lead you through Roman ruins. You’ll get history, culture, and the stories behind what you see.
Areas famous for local and natural resources often offer adrenaline-filled experiences, which make for a nice change. Consider a hot-air balloon tour in the Loire Valley, a sailing class in Normandy, a paragliding (or climbing, or skiing) experience in the Swiss Alps, as just a few of many possibilities.
Does a focus on experiences mean you can’t visit museums? Absolutely not! Europe has amazing, landmark museums that you cannot miss—and that even teenagers will appreciate, if approached in the right way.
For the landmark museums—some of which could take an entire day, if not days on end—focus your visit and make it as interactive as possible. Find an amazing guide to give you a themed tour (i.e., of the highlights, of a period in history, of a certain subject matter) that lasts no longer than two hours. I do not recommend visiting a landmark museum with a teenager without a guide!
Look for the quirky and off-beat museums, too. As examples, consider the London Dungeon in London and the catacombs in Paris or the catacombs in Rome—both have a weird, quirky, and even creepy aspect that will get any teenager’s attention.
Smaller museums are less overwhelming, often have a more specific focus, and will feel more engaging and accessible. Often, too, theme-specific museums often have a naturally interactive and experiential approach than large museums filled with rooms piled with art and artifacts.
Play their Paparazzi
A family trip deserves documentation—and though your teen may roll their eyes at you when it comes to posing for family photographs, everyone appreciates those snapshots. You might appreciate them immediately. Your teen will appreciate them in a few years.
But don’t just take family photographs.
The peer gaze and associated dynamic has primary importance for teenagers. Today, that includes the heavy sharing of photos and videos via text and social networks—photos and videos that do not, ideally for your teen, include the rest of the family.
Serve as your teenager’s photographer by taking photo and video of just them for them to share immediately or nearly immediately to their friends. You can do this by borrowing their smartphone or you can take the photos with your smartphone and zap them over to your teen when you get to a WiFi connection.
Your teen having photo and video to share of their European vacation as it unfolds—with them as the focal point, enjoying the experience—will help them see the “coolness” of the trip via the eyes of their friends’ reactions.
I promise they’ll appreciate the trip even more this way.
Be Cool with Device Time
You may want your teenager to spend the entire trip focused on family togetherness, but the primacy of peers at this point in a person’s life means that an entire vacation without access to devices—and thereby their friends and online networks—will make them miserable.
You need to give your teenager some amount of device time, even if you provide parameters so that they’re not on their devices every moment of the trip.
Also, you need to ensure they can connect to the internet on the vacation, whether this means buying them a data plan for travel abroad during your trip or ensuring you have a good WiFi connection at your base of stay, where they can connect and share and communicate with their peers.
Note: When it comes to giving teens device parameters, remember that these parameters should apply to you, too. If you’re checking your device constantly or staring into it often, you shouldn’t expect them to do otherwise.
Give Them Independence and Autonomy
One of the most amazing aspects of a European vacation, especially for teenagers, is the autonomy most of the small and medium cities allow.
In comparison with almost any city in the United States, European cities have much more walkability, bikeability, and public transportation possibilities. You do not need to drive places to see and do and experience. In fact, I’d argue that wandering even somewhat aimlessly in most European cities is where a lot of magic lies.
This means that a vacation to European cities for many teens means a chance for independence and autonomy that they crave but often cannot achieve at home at this stage in their lives.
Allowing your teenager free time to wander the world may trigger parental anxiety. You should absolutely set ground rules (and perhaps turn on—even if only for the trip—the tracking feature available on most smartphones). Yet let them wander! They’ll come back energized and with stories to share with you and, yes, their friends.
To make their wandering more enjoyable—and to help them have some autonomy even with the family during group activities—give your teen pocket money for the trip, a budget for each day, or tell them to bring a bit from their savings so they can purchase food, drink, activities, and souvenirs that call to them.
Europe is a Dream for Teenagers (or Can Be!)
Visiting countries and cities in Europe is a dream for everyone—and it can be a life-changing experience for teenagers, too, if orchestrated correctly.
On a trip to many places in Europe, teenagers can have a taste of the independence and autonomy they crave at their age, can spend quality time creating indelible memories with family (which they pretend not to crave, but do), and can see a new part of the world and a different way of living—and visit sites great for capturing and sharing with friends via photo and video—in an accessible way.