If you have children, choosing the right type of family holiday can be a bit of a minefield, especially if you have younger ones. To make it worse, if you have children at school the prices of holidays are much more expensive during school holidays. If you want the most flexibility during your holiday booking a holiday cottage or villa could be the perfect choice.

Flexibility

A villa or holiday cottage is just like an extension of your home. this means that it is often the most flexible accommodation that you can get. Kids don’t always follow the convention, and if they want to run around excited on their holiday before they go to bed, then the flexibility is there, unlike if you were staying in a hotel or similar. Mealtimes are a similar thing. In hotels mealtimes are fairly rigid unless you want to pay for room service. However, if you are staying in a villa or cottage, you can eat whenever it is convenient for you and your family.

Your own space

The one thing that I absolutely love about cottage holidays is that you have plenty of your own space.  There are not many types of holiday accommodation where you can have exclusive private use of gardens, parking etc. If we want to have a barbecue in the garden, or to have a water fight with the children etc, we can do what we want. Our last holiday cottage in Scotland had an absolutely huge garden surrounded by huge bushes giving total privacy in the middle of the highlands. We even had access to meadows on the hill behind and a stream with a swing just outside of the garden. The pièce de résistance though was the hot tub. Chilling out after a day of playing tourist was amazing!

Easier to pay for

If you are not made of money, a holiday cottage is easier to pay for. We don’t have a huge amount of money (who does when they have children!) so the ability to pay in multiple payments after booking the cottage were a life saver. Otherwise we would have had to try to borrow money or max out the credit card before we even went.

Good base for travel

Because there are vastly more holiday cottages, apartments and villas than hotels etc, there is much more choice of location. This makes choosing the perfect location to be a base for your travels during your holiday much easier. As an example, on our last holiday to Scotland, we chose a property that was in a pretty remote location but was very close to the main roads in between a wide range of locations that we intended to visit. it also meant we could avoid rush hour traffic in the more built up areas.

Come and go as you please

As a photographer, I often head out to photograph the sunrise leaving the house at anywhere from 3am to 4am. It is easy to do this while staying in a holiday property, although I still must be as quiet as possible to not wake up my family. In a hotel it is not always as easy to come and go at that time of night and loading your car and pulling out of the car park at that time of the morning might not always be as welcome.

For your next family holiday, why not consider staying in a holiday cottage, villa or apartment too. It could make your holiday a whole lot easier.