Thread: Tips for planning vacations for larger families.

I'm in the process of trying to plan our next family vacation and I noticed that a lot of the sites like Hotwire and Kayak only let you search up to 4 people. Well we have 5. I know there are rooms out there that accomadate up to 5 or 6 people as we've done it before but it's harder to find. Can you ladies give me some tips for planning our vacation like websites that allow you to search for good deals on hotels or ways to save money or find coupons or deals on your destination. For the record we're going to Ocean City MD and we're planning on going after labor day when the rates drop. Help...rooms are filling up fast. Thanks.

I have started using the airbnb.com site to book places to stay.
If you search the town and look for the entire apt......well, I found 26 results

Airbnb Search

The places I have stayed have been top notch....usually I look for ones with many reviews of the place and positive comments. I notice only the first one on the search has a couple reviews.....but look it over anyway for ideas.

We have had very good luck renting through VRBO® is Vacation Rentals By Owner (Vacation Rentals By Owner). Especially with somewhere like Ocean City I would think you could tap into a lot of people renting their own. As for more mainstream hotels/motels, we usually call likely looking places and actually talk to the front desk (not their national reservations number). So far people have been pretty flexible with us having five in three beds or 2-3 beds and a couch, but as our youngest gets bigger that could change. (She's five.)

Nonetheless, I find it frustrating to look for places to stay with a "non-standard" family size! Good luck.

Thanks ladies. I did eventually after long debate go through the specific hotel and book. I'm just hoping I made the right choice. We've not had a vacation since I was pregnant with Angel and that was 9 years ago and I so want this one to go well. We're already starting with several strikes against us so it makes me even more nervous and more stressed to make this vacation the best it can be.

Well, I see you've already booked, but I thought I'd respond anyway.

We have a family of 6. Typically, when we book hotels we go with the Marriott chain. Most of their Residence Inn hotels can accommodate a family of 6, plus they have kitchens! Other hotels that have worked out very well for us are the Springhill Suites (many have rooms with 2 Queen beds and a sofa bed!), Fairfield Inn's, and Courtyards. The only drawback to Courtyards are that they usually do not come with a complimentary breakfast, and the others do--though we did luck out last summer and got a Courtyard outside of Toronto for less than $100/night that also included breakfast for all 6 of us!

Since we stick with the same chain most of the time, we've been able to rack up lots of rewards points, which we've used for free hotel rooms on other vacations.