The Space Between Wanting to Go and Wondering If It's Worth It

The heaviest part of family travel is often the space before the trip. Its this gap between knowing you want to go somewhere with your kids and wondering if it's actually worth the energy it will cost you to get there. 

I’ve had this discussion with my husband a thousand times. I really want to go, he sees the trip as this huge barrier to overcome. Every time we go, we have the best time but every time we plan it feels like this uphill battle we’re not sure if we’re willing to fight. 

I've been to over sixty countries. Travel has been one of the most defining parts of my life. And then I had kids, and travel didn't stop being important. It got harder in a way I didn't expect. Every trip turned into a project, and the project always landed on me. 

I'm organized. I'm capable. I've planned trips for myself across continents. But once you're planning around a four-year-old's propensity to eat only chicken nuggets and a one-year-old's intense nap schedule and a husband whose definition of relaxation involves not making thirty micro-decisions a day, planning a family trip stops being a logistics problem and starts being an emotional one. You're not just researching hotels. You're holding everyone's preferences and limits and moods in your head at the same time, trying to thread the needle. And you're doing it on your phone, at 10pm, after the kids are asleep.

I started Kin because I realized millions of moms were doing this exact thing. Alone. With tools that weren't built for them.

The travel industry has been built around the assumption that people want more options, and that planning is the fun part. Both are wrong when you're a parent. You don't want more options. You want fewer, better ones. And planning isn't fun when you're the one carrying it all by yourself, when the stakes are your family's actual experience, when getting it wrong means a meltdown in a museum.

Travel with your kids is one of the most important things you can do for them. It pulls them off screens. It shows them the world. It gives your family the kind of time together that doesn't come around once they're older. They are only little once.

And right now, the version of family travel most parents experience makes that time hard to access. The planning is so heavy that by the time the trip starts, you're already depleted. You're not the parent you wanted to be on the trip, because you spent the last three weeks being the planner. That's the real loss.

That's what Kin exists to fix.

I'm building the thing that makes me feel excited to travel. The thing that makes my husband feel like its doable. Access to someone who knows the place and knows my family, with the kind of always-on support that I’ve not been able to find so far. Something that gets smarter every trip. Something that lets me put the phone down and actually be there.

If you've been living in the space between wanting to go and wondering if it's worth it, I'm building this for you.

— Candice