luxury family travel

Best Family Vacations Around the World

Scottish Pursuits at Gleneagle Hotel in Scotland

Luxist readers have nominated their favorite luxury destinations for families around the world. From Scotland to Hawaii and South Africa, these destinations offer wonderful programs tailored specifically for children, in addition to luxurious accommodations and other incredible amenities.

The top five summer vacation destinations for families, according to our readers, include:

Gleneagles Hotel

When the Gleneagles Hotel opened in 1924, it was described as 'a Riviera in the Highlands' and 'the eighth wonder of the world'. Then as now, the Gleneagles Hotel was the glorious playground for people dedicated to leisure and pleasure in the most luxurious surroundings.

Set in 850 acres of Perthshire countryside, Gleneagles is a unique place for families to escape. It is home to three of the top Scottish Championship Golf Courses and also offers a wide range of exhilarating outdoor leisure activities, all of which exemplify the longstanding Scottish sporting heritage.

Gleneagles is like going to camp as a family, albeit a luxurious one, with its world-class sporting schools. Dedicated to the cultivation of classic sportsmanship, the schools offer children and adults rewarding 'hands on' instructional programs, fueling the trend to learn while on vacation and introducing the simple pleasures of country sports to families.

World-class instruction is offered in a variety of outdoor pursuits including Falconry (where kids take part in a falconry lesson and learn how to cast the hawk from their gloved hand and then call it back), Horseback Riding, Fishing, Shooting and Archery. There's a Golf Academy as well as a Gundogs School which offers a unique opportunity to experience gundog training. There's also a Junior Off Road and All-Terrain Off Road Course available for kids aged four to nine. Here, kids learn valuable driving skills at the wheel of mini Land Rover replicas over a purpose built course, designed to mimic the grown ups' off road course. Children ten years or older learn how to operate Argo cats, which are eight-wheel-drive, all-weather, all-terrain, tiller-controlled vehicles that operate on land and in water on a challenging purpose-built course.

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Tell Us Everything, Travel Entrepreneur Katrina A. Garnett

by Carrie N. Culpepper (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Tell Us Everything

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Katrina Garnett recently launched My Little Swans, a luxury family travel web site for adventurous families looking for one-of-a-kind adventures that involve things like lunch at a Bedoin camp in Jordan and sailing Alaska's Inside Passage on a private yacht. Unlike her previous, very-techie businesses, this one was born out of Garnett's hobby: She's originally from Australia and she and her husband regularly take their three children on ambitious trips across the globe.

Garnett's not intimidated by traveling with kids, instead she's passionate about the advantages of exposing children to world cultures. MyLittleSwans.com aims to cut out the travel agent by featuring itineraries from her many trips with restaurant, hotel, shopping and other suggestions of places she and her concierge partners have personally vetted. Plus, the site's selected list of tour operators in each of those destinations can arrange for custom adventures from a backstage tour of a Chinese opera to a hiking trip with the Maasai tribe in Tanzania.

Garnett – and by extension her site – is like that in-the-know friend always up on the newest, hottest and best. But she also shares the little-known, like her personal watchmaker in Switzerland and jeweler in Paris. She spent two years and more than $2 million of her own money developing the site and made sure it included a social media aspect, which she believes is essential for web 2.0 success. We chatted with this firecracker over drinks at New York's Gramercy Tavern and asked her to Tell Us Everything.

Why did you decide to go into travel?
I've been planning world adventures for my family for 15 years, from the time my firstborn was less than a year old. Over the years, numerous friends and acquaintances have sought me out for travel advice, so I've shared my itineraries and photos with them, and they've taken the same or similar trips and loved them.

But as the number of requests grew – and the Web became increasingly difficult to navigate from a discerning point of view – I saw there was need for a comprehensive trustworthy online resource that makes it easy for families to plan extraordinary journeys and to go straight to the source for the best guides and insider experiences.

My Little Swans is not just a bunch of pretty pictures and opinions. There are, of course, countless travel websites and online sources, but I think few that are developed with an eye to the future and a deep understanding of the tech underbelly; I'm a total tech nerd. And as most of my friends know, I'm also a bit of a perfectionist and can be a nut when it comes to research, so the MLS content reflects this 150 percent and always will – nothing is "pay for play" or ad-driven.

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