For six years, the Grand Fiesta Americana in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, catered to guests looking for relaxation and romance — as long as they left the kids at home.
But in 2021, when the property, the sole adults-only all-inclusive resort in town, was acquired by Hilton, its new owners made a hard pivot. What was once a child-free retreat is now the family-friendly Hilton Vallarta Riviera All-Inclusive Resort, with a kids’ club, a teen zone with pool tables and video games, and activities like face-painting and cooking classes.
The resort is among dozens of properties worldwide that have reinvented themselves since the beginning of the pandemic to appeal to one of the fastest-growing sectors of travelers: families. A July survey by the Family Travel Association found that 85 percent of parents in the United States planned to travel with their children in the next 12 months, and many don’t want to squeeze into a standard double room. Hotels.com reports that searches for properties with cribs are up 65 percent on its site since the beginning of the pandemic; for connecting rooms, they’ve jumped 20 percent. In the face of this demand, many hotels are opting for makeovers, hauling in sleeper sofas, building bunk beds or eliminating no-child policies.
“We knew we needed to make some adjustments, and not just include a kids’ club,” said Mónica Gonzalez, director of sales and marketing for the resort. “So what we did was create a program for the entire family.”
The resort has split up its two towers: One is now for adults only and the other for families. One pool is still reserved for adults, while the other is often packed with preschoolers wearing floats and tweens doing cannonballs. In the family tower, all accommodations can be booked as connecting rooms, and the racy former artwork — like paintings of topless women — has been swapped for G-rated beach scenes.
Since the resort opened to children in November 2021, Ms. Gonzalez said, bookings are 60 percent families.
Going ‘full family’
At Winvian Farm, a luxury resort on 113 acres in Connecticut, children were traditionally allowed on the property only during a handful of designated periods like Labor Day weekend and Christmas Day. That policy went out the window during the pandemic, said the managing director, Heather Smith Winkelmann, when parents, burned out from virtual work and school, began calling and begging for a space for everyone to get away.
“Once the pandemic hit, everybody’s travel philosophy did a complete 180,” Ms. Winkelmann said. “So we went full family.”
All restriction dates for children have been lifted, and sleeper sofas with plush mattresses have been added to every room. Today, 35 percent of the resort’s bookings come from families, and Ms. Smith Winkelmann said there were no plans to go back. A mother of a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old, she said that her own feelings about traveling with children have shifted.
“Even for me, if I’m going to go somewhere now, I’m like, ‘Let’s take the kids,’” she said. “We’ve all had our own epiphanies over the last three years.”
Real estate developers say the long months of lockdown changed parents’ views on traveling with their children.
“Everyone kind of re-evaluated what was important to them,” said Spencer Levine, president of RAL Companies and Affiliates, a New York City developer. He is currently finishing up design plans on a new Mandarin Oriental property on Grand Cayman, which plans to break ground this year. The design, he said, has shifted as family travel has become more popular.
All accommodations will now be built as two connecting rooms with a single-entry foyer, allowing parents and children to have some privacy.
“I know from traveling with my own family, it’s really great to have the privacy of being there with your spouse, and the kids also having their own space,” he said. “People are actually less price-conscious now, and much more about their life experiences with their families.”
Bigger rooms and bunk beds
Grandparents are being included more often, too: Data from Zicasso, a luxury travel planner, reveals group bookings of six or more have grown by more than 50 percent since before the pandemic; vacasa.com, which rents vacation homes, says search volume for four- and five-bedroom properties was up 40 percent at the end of 2022. So now even traditionally family-friendly properties are offering larger, better-decorated spaces. For example, the Great Wolf Lodge in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, a water park resort, is building 30 new three-bedroom villas for larger families, and has tapped the celebrity designer Nate Berkus for its private outdoor patios.
And it isn’t just hotels. Destinations that traditionally attracted a grown-up crowd are shifting, too.
“The new generation of high-end travelers are all traveling with their kids. They even take them to party destinations,” said Theodore Daktylidis, managing director of the Mykonos Riviera Hotel and Spa, which opened in July and is made up entirely of small apartments, each with its own kitchen and plunge pool.
Mr. Daktylidis’s family has owned hotels in Mykonos, famous for its nightlife, for decades, hosting countless weddings, honeymoons and raucous bachelorette parties. But while overseeing construction on his newest project, it was the growing number of visitors with young children he was thinking about.
“We’ve seen so many families travel here over the past few years. Currently 15 to 20 percent of our guests are parents with kids,” he said.
At Red Jacket Resorts on Cape Cod, Mass., the property, which was recently sold, is testing out pilot rooms with lofted bunks built above a standard king bed, creating rooms that comfortably sleep six. The new owner says market research shows that the conversion of these rooms could generate an extra $80 to $100 per room per night for the hotel, while offering families a less expensive option than booking two separate rooms to accommodate their whole party.
The owners of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo in Italy’s Lake Como region are so convinced that parents will spend more that they’re reducing the number of rooms to make more space to cater to families. The hotel closes each year for winter, and when it reopens this month, it will have reduced its rooms to 84 from 90, converting the added space into two new penthouses and several larger suites with sofa beds and outdoor terraces.
“This year our property was busier than ever with multigenerational groups of families,” said Valentina De Santis, Grand Hotel Tremezzo’s owner and chief executive. “The decision to decrease our room count follows a strategic plan.”
And Troutbeck, an estate hotel in the Hudson Valley of New York, reports that family travel is up 40 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, so one of its three historic buildings underwent a renovation last summer and is now made up entirely of suites with private entrances and either a balcony or a screened-in porch.
D.J.s and strollers
At some hotels, as loyal guests grow up and expand their families, rooms are being expanded to keep up.
When the Hoxton opened its first property in London in the mid-2000s, the lobby was full of 20-something travelers who gravitated toward the brand for amenities like bars and D.J.s. The trend continued as the brand spread across Europe and into North America.
Not so anymore. Hoxton doesn’t track the number of families checking into its rooms, but Olivia Tucker Amato, Hoxton’s brand director for North America, says that in places like London, Amsterdam and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, parents with young children now make up a major chunk of Hoxton guests. And as guests’ families have grown, so have the spaces they’re looking to book. In Barcelona, Hoxton has introduced one- and two-bedroom suites with kitchenettes, a property opening in Amsterdam this fall will have rooms with either a second king-size bed or bunk beds, and one debuting in Edinburgh this fall will have three-bedroom apartments.
The expanded spaces are being rolled out alongside a new program, Tiny Hox, that offers amenities like cribs, kid-friendly menus in restaurants, flexible booking times, diapers and bath toys.
“The guests who stayed with us in their 20s are now in their 30s and 40s and have matured into the family stage of life,” Ms. Amato said. “If you go to the Hoxton Williamsburg on the weekend, it’s packed with strollers, and we welcome that.”
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