Esencia Family Travel, LLC

The School District’s vacation planning tool

Finding time for family travel can be tough. The most expensive and crowded times to travel are Summer, Spring Break and Holiday Break. For working parents, traveling during these periods can create unique stress on the job. Traveling on peak times may conflict with important project deadlines or make it that much harder to get coverage while you’re out.
There’s the straightforward solution of just skipping school, but you don’t just want to pull your kid out of school at the wrong time. You risk them being out during iReady or State testing, or when they planned to present their favorite class project of the year. Also, most of us really value our kids education. As much as the classroom of the world is great, we don’t want it to come at the expense of math facts.
The Board Approved school calendars are your friend, here. You may remember the panic when you realized the kids had a full week of short days or a random 4 day weekend in February. Turn that panic into opportunity. Most businesses don’t observe the 4 day President’s Day weekend that Capo provides. No workplaces are providing a full week off for Thanksgiving, either. These are all perfect opportunities to find travel values if used correctly.

A few timing tricks

• Call that travel agent guy you know (me). He probably has some ideas on when its good to travel.
• The day before breaks are nearly always fluff. Get a flight out on the last day of school, or just skip it and get out one night early. Even a one day school break can turn into a 4 day adventure that way. Thursdays are usually cheap travel days, too.
• Fly back Tuesday morning after a long break for the biggest savings. Yes, you might miss an extra 2 days of school, but those days are typically just the kids getting back into the flow, anyway. You can save thousands in airfare this way on some trips.
• Focus on travel during breaks that are unique to your district. Every district in the country is out for the week of Christmas. So, you’ll be fighting crowds. Travel the second week of that break, or weekend before. Everyone gets Thanksgiving and the day after off, but not everyone gets the full week. Use that unique time to find a bargain.
• Schedule conferences on the first or last slot of the week.
• Take advantage of the kids being in preschool, kinder, or even first grade. The older they get, the harder it is to pull them out of school without an impact. Taking a week off in the middle of the year is viable in these younger grades. Try to coordinate with the teacher on where to focus any side lessons with your kid while you’re out.
• (Don’t tell the principal I said this). Don’t call your kid out “on vacation”. Check the district policies on absences, and make sure you come up with a good reason your kid is out. We got a truancy letter from the District for our kinder kid the first year she was in school. Learn from our naïveté and avoid the wrath of the district.

When to Travel

Taking a look at the 2023-24 school calendar for Capo, as an example, let’s look for when to travel.

• November
  • Conference week. Two days off and the rest short days. Get on it and schedule the first or last conference of the week. Then, give me a call and schedule the rest of the week at Aulani, on a Cruise, or in Walt Disney World. The short days the kids are in class are a bit of a blowoff anyway. Teachers are focused on parent meetings.
  • Thanksgiving week. The key word here is “week”. Travel the day before Thanksgiving or the weekend after Thanksgiving can be brutal. A Thursday night departure the week before break and a Tuesday return right before Thanksgiving can be an awesome 5 day window to create some family memories to share at the Thanksgiving table. Disney has their holiday themes up by this time, usually, too. If Thanksgiving is flexible, incredible return flight deals can be found the day of Thanksgiving.
• December
  • Take your elf on a memorable journey with the kids leading in to the holidays. Here was the agenda for the last few days of school leading into holiday break for most kids: movie, movie, free read, extra long recess. In 2023 that could have opened up a big long weekend for travel before the break. In 2024 and 2025 with mid-week Christmas dates, that means a big window to get out and get ready for the holidays somewhere special. In 2024 just by skipping that last day of school before break (which begins on the 20th), you can get a 6 night trip in and be back on Christmas Eve. Contact me to see the giant tree at Rockefeller Center and window shop at FAO Schwartz (yes, its open again), or hop on a Christmas themed Disney Cruise.
• January
  • Coming from the midwest, I was always shocked that our kids get the FULL week after New Years off, but they do. This is unique and creates an opportunity to travel at a comparative bargain. By extending the break just another day, or two, you also travel on some of the cheapest days of the winter (the Tuesday after NYD is typically an extraordinarily affordable return day).
• February
  • Presidents Day plus a flurry of short days after for conferences. These extra days are unique to 2024, but in 2025/2026 you get a conference week in early March that can be used just like November. Departing the Thursday before Lincoln Day gives you a nice long weekend. It’s enough time to hop on a Disney Cruise out of San Diego or get out to Florida and hit up EPCOT, Disney World Resort, and Animal Kingdom.
• June
  • Again, my midwest roots show, but “LAST DAY OF SCHOOL FOR ALL STUDENTS Thursday, May 30, 2024” on the local district calendar is shocking. Remember, most of the midwest doesn’t start school till Labor Day and gets out mid-late June. So, by hitting the road right after school gets out, you will find crowds lighter and travel cheaper than the rest of the summer. Getting out that first week of summer break is also nice as it can open up the sports/camp calendar for a full summer for the kids. traveling mid-summer sometimes means missing key games, performances, or that one camp that your kid loves every year. Early June is warm enough in Alaska and still, usually, cool enough to be tolerable in Orlando.

If any of these times sound like a good one to start building new travel memories with your family, contact me and let’s get things ready. I can help you find the best deals and share the nuances of your destination during any time of year.

Contact us now, and let’s start planning your next chapter of memories together!