This is the philosophy at the heart of how I plan family travel. Not the pursuit of the largest suite or the most awarded resort (though those things matter, and they matter a great deal), but the relentless focus on what happens inside the experience, and with whom.
The Suite Is the Stage, Not the Story
Luxury travel at its finest is a backdrop for living. The immaculate pool villa in Koh Samui, the private beach at a Maldivian resort, the suite overlooking the Seine, these are not the point. They are the conditions under which the point becomes possible.
When you remove the friction of ordinary life, the logistics, the noise, the endless to-do list, something remarkable happens. Conversations that have been waiting for years finally find their moment. Children, freed from screens and schedules, rediscover the simple joy of their parents’ company. Couples remember why they fell in love with traveling together in the first place.
Who’s Coming? The Question That Shapes Everything
When a family comes to me with a destination in mind, my first question is, “Tell me about the people traveling with you.”
Because a multigenerational trip that includes a grandparent with mobility considerations needs a completely different property footprint than a family with three under-ten children who will be in the pool from seven in the morning. A couple celebrating their anniversary alongside their teenagers needs spaces that offer proximity and privacy in equal measure.
The most thoughtful luxury properties understand this instinctively. They design for togetherness with the wisdom that families also need breathing room, the ability to be together and apart, sometimes simultaneously.
A beachfront villa where the children can sleep steps from their parents, but in their own wing. A resort with a genuinely excellent kids’ program, so that parents can have a long lunch without guilt, and children arrive at dinner with stories of their own.
Getting this right requires knowing both the property deeply and the family intimately. It’s the part of my work I find most meaningful.
What You Carry Home
Material things pile up and eventually fade from memory. But experiences, particularly those shared at moments of intensity, beauty, or novelty, become part of the family’s history.
The afternoon the children learned to make pasta from a Venetian nonna, and came to dinner proudly announcing they had cooked. The morning a whale surfaced alongside the boat in the waters off Alaska, and nobody said a word for a full minute. The evening a grandfather and his grandchildren watched a lion pride move across the Serengeti from the back of a game drive truck, and found, unexpectedly, that they had plenty to talk about.
These are the stories that get told and retold for years, and they happen most reliably when the conditions have been thoughtfully prepared in advance, invisibly, so that your family simply arrives and experiences.
What This Means in Practice
When I plan a family trip, I am thinking about arrival day (because the first few hours set the tone for everything that follows), about pace (because overscheduled travel is exhausting travel, regardless of the price point), about the ages and temperaments of every person traveling, about the one activity that will become the story everyone tells, and about the small touches that I can build in quietly. The birthday cake that appears without being asked for. The room stocked with the things your child loves. The table that has been held at the restaurant with the view.
Bookings
If you are planning a journey and want to talk about who you’re traveling with, I would love to hear from you. Because that, more than any destination, is where we begin.
Ilonka Molijn – van Ginkel
Creator & Founder of Sophibee · Luxury Travel Advisor & Travel Editor
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