Travel ideas for those who plan ahead

DPA

If you’re a parent, you know the importance of having college and wedding funds. Now, if you want to be on the cutting edge of financial planning, you’ll also want to invest in a travel fund.
“We’re looking at a generation of parents who have been lucky enough to travel themselves, and they want to have that for their children as well,” said Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell, co-owner and director of the bespoke travel agency Cazenove+Loyd, in an interview. Perhaps as important, these parents don’t want to put their bucket lists on hold for 20 years until their children fly the coop. Instead, they’d rather bring their kids along for extreme, educational adventures — as soon as they’re ready for it.
Legacy Travel, Cazenove+Loyd’s newly minted program, aims to take the guesswork out of long-term family travel planning. The basic premise: Agents find out how many children are in a family, what they enjoy doing, what they’re learning in school, and what their parents want to see and do. Then they create a long-term travel schedule that outlines the family’s trips for the next three to 10 years—yes, all in one fell swoop.

BIG COSTS, BIG BENEFITS
“Without being a sentimental softy about it, [exposing kids to a lifetime of travel] can be a way to input into someone’s development,” said Wilmot-Sitwell, “certainly a lot more than what a beach holiday could do.” In his 25 years as a travel specialist, he said, he has watched kids develop interests in photography, medicine, politics, and more as a result of global vacations. He said these kids grow up to have an awareness of the world that can’t be gleaned from textbooks. And in his experience, well-traveled children often find more meaningful careers in their adult lives.
It’s one thing to plan travel 10 years down the line, another thing entirely to financially plan for it. According to Wilmot-Sitwell, the typical trip with Cazenove+Loyd goes for $10,000–$12,000 per person. (He concedes that these are not your normal jaunts to Paris; they are once-a-year, experiential trips to exotic, far-flung places.) To accomplish one each year for 10 years requires an investment of nearly half a million dollars for a family of four.
As a result, most families need to plan. Kathy Sudeikis, a family travel specialist based in Chicago, noticed an increase in families who wanted to lay out their travels several years at a time and, as a result, joined forces three years ago with a financial planner.
“My job is to help them create their bucket lists,” she said, but “financial advisers are providing an outlet to help them fulfill those dreams.” She advises families on when to take which trips, according to their children’s ages, and creates a travel calendar that stretches several years into the future.
More travel agents are joining her in teaming up with financial advisers. In fact, it was a recommendation that agents affiliated with the high-end consortium Virtuoso get on board with a wealth management professional to help realize their clients’ bucket lists—and retain a loyal clientele for many years.
Said Sudeikis, “The growth of the travel industry is pegged exactly to this: educational experiences. Not frivolous travel, but trips that shape you into a world citizen.”

WHEN AND WHERE TO GO
At Cazenove+Loyd, trip planning is limited to three (very big) regions: Africa, Central/South America, and South/Southeast Asia. For the company’s largely European clientele, it’s easy enough to take a weeklong trip to Kenya or Sri Lanka. “We’re not, and sadly never could be, [our clients’] exclusive travel provider, said Wilmot-Sitwell, who knows his clients may want to go skiing or take a beach vacation in Florida. “We just hope to be their complete solution on the wacky, experiential, exotic trips,” he says.
When it comes to those big-ticket trips, most travel professionals, including Wilmot-Sitwell and Sudeikis, say that kids only begin to be ready for them when they turn eight years old. “That’s when they start having meaningful experiences of destinations—when they start learning about history and literature,” said Sudeikis.
Sam McClure, an Austin-based travel advisor that exclusively works on family travel, disagrees. “Even at three to four years old, kids start understanding the differences between time zones, food, accents … they will get something out of it at that age.” She recalled her son, at four years old, getting ready for bed and wondering about the people in Europe who were just waking up. “Every family has a different map and a different timeline,” she said.
In McClure’s experience, those who start young become more flexible travelers down the line. She recommends trips to Europe for the youngest set, interactive wilderness trips to places like Australia and the Galapagos Islands for seven- or eight-year-olds, and such places as Greece and Egypt for pre-middle-school kids learning about ancient civilizations. Preteens, she said, have the highest tolerance for museums, while teenagers are looking for active and exotic experiences.