Family world tour: tips before you start

It sounds like a dream reserved for a handful of globetrotters, without ties or constraints. And yet, more and more families are daring to embark on long journeys lasting a year or more. We asked eight of them for advice. What budget should you plan for? What mode of transportation should you choose? And what about school? There’s always a solution, as long as you have the motivation.

World Tour

What if traveling the planet was no longer the preserve of great adventurers, but a project accessible to families too? In any case, it seems that more and more parents are deciding to embark on the adventure. “It’s clearly an upward trend,” confirms Sylvain Cheynier, co-founder of Tourdumondiste.com , with supporting figures . Surveys carried out by this website dedicated to long-distance travel show that in 2024, 15% of round-the-world trips were organized by families, compared to 9% in 2018. “This is a consequence of the explosion of long-distance tourism at the beginning of the 21st century ,” analyzes Sylvain Cheynier. “The young people who set off at that time with their backpacks have since become parents and find in this configuration an opportunity to do it again.”

An increase that doesn’t necessarily mean that the practice is becoming commonplace. Traveling around the world with your children remains the journey of a lifetime, and it requires organization, dedication, and a healthy dose of motivation. We interviewed eight families who, for six months or five years, by sailboat, bicycle, or van , dared to take on the challenge. They share their experience, their advice… and their encouragement.

Giving meaning to your family trip

Leaving is good. With a good reason, it’s even better. For some, it can seem as simple as it seems: “We were very happy in our lives, we were 40 years old, we wanted to enjoy some quality time with our families… so we decided to hit the road!” , summarizes Céline Treussier, who embarked in 2019 with her husband and her sons aged 4 and 2 on a sixteen-month cycle crossing of Eurasia, between Annecy and Bangkok . Spending quality time with her children, introducing them to the world, enriching their culture, making them more open and resourceful: these are motives that become driving forces.

But for other families, the reason is more personal. Anne-Laure and Gwénolé Gahinet’s round-the-world sailing trip with their two daughters, for example, is part of a process to promote an alternative lifestyle and energy efficiency: “We wanted to go beyond our family project, so we invested in a wooden boat that we equipped with basic equipment without resorting to new technologies, to demonstrate that this mode of navigation was possible ,” explains Anne-Laure from Polynesia , where she is currently after almost four years of travel.

Them to lose their sight. The idea of the couple of parents was therefore to take them to the four corners of the Earth to fill their eyes with exceptional scenes, before it was too late.

All the families interviewed agree that they should be included as much as possible: ” They were the ones who chose what they wanted to see, from wild animals in Africa to temples in Indochina and the Mongolian steppes ,” continues Édith Lemay.

“It’s very important to listen to them ,” says Adeline Bayle, five years after backpacking around the southern hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean with her husband Richard and their two children. ” Colombia was originally one of our destinations, but our adopted daughter, who was born there, wasn’t ready to go, so we simply removed her from our itinerary and readjusted the trip.”

For single father Thomas Spoerry, who returned last year from eleven months of traveling with his two teenagers, the most important thing was to anticipate with them the absence of their mother for this long period, the latter not having wanted to come and see them in the middle of their trip for ecological reasons . “Fortunately, I was able to see that we live in an era where Wi-Fi is accessible even in the heart of the pampas! So we were able to organize regular video conferences with her.”