It seems like only yesterday that I was boarding a plane while juggling a car seat, stroller, and squirming baby. But I have quickly reached the other bookend of the family travel story: traveling with a teen on the cusp of adulthood.
Looming large on the horizon? College. In just over a year's time my oldest will be packing up to leave the nest. Our travels together today look very different than they did a decade and a half a ago. Of late, they've been singularly focused on one goal: her college search.
My California kid seems determined to leave the West Coast, so we have no choice but to travel to explore the universities that interest her most. You know I'm not complaining about any excuse to travel though! This year, we hopped on a plane for three separate college visits to other parts of the country.
The first trip we combined with a visit to see my family in North Carolina last summer before her junior year. The second we took during her junior year fall break to Washington D.C. and Virginia. And we completed a third during spring break to the Northeast corridor from Boston to Philadelphia.
With three major college trips under my belt, and numerous hours of conversations logged with friends who have launched their own teens into college life the last few years, I have learned a lot of lessons about planning and making the most of college visits.
Distant trips or ones involving multiple school stops can present a pretty high level of logistical and scheduling difficulty. But they are really necessary for many high schoolers. They can also be pretty rewarding - both to help your child figure out what they are looking for in a school as well as to lock in a little one-on-one time with your kid before they are gone.
Here are our tips and lessons learned for making the most of college tours - both as a savvy traveler and as a prospective student.
1. Start looking at colleges before you’re even looking at colleges.
While our official college trips started in the summer between my daughter's sophomore and junior years, we realized we had been working college visits into some of our life and travels much earlier than that. That turned out to be helpful!
From UC Berkeley which is close to home and Davidson College which is minutes from my parents' house outside of Charlotte, NC, we've found ourselves on at least a few college campuses without even trying over the years.
And when we've traveled to a few college towns for other reasons, we've at least made an effort to swing by and see parts of campus. As a result, we ended up seeing both UC Santa Barbara and the University of Wisconsin-Madison when we were in those areas for other travel purposes several years ago.
Related: Best College Towns to Visit with Kids
The key at this point is simply for your child to have an idea of what a different college campuses can look like - urban, rural, big, small, etc. That experience helped my daughter start to narrow down what kinds of colleges she might be interested in and in what areas of the country.
2. Set aside vacation time for college trips - maybe earlier than you'd think.
When it is time to start looking at colleges more purposefully, some families will need to start that process earlier than they might expect. If your child is considering colleges a long way from home - like mine is - you might need quite a bit of runway. Unless your child is targeting one very specific geographical location, you'll probably need to schedule multiple trips to see several campuses. Finding time to do that during the already very busy constraints of junior and early senior year is incredibly difficult.
Plus, if your child is likely to apply early decision or early action to a school, they need to figure out their preferences earlier than the standard timeline.
This means you need to set aside time in your family vacation schedule to make trips happen. You may have to torpedo regular family vacations at fall or spring break, especially during junior year. We didn't understand this timeline and initially booked a Disney cruise for spring break of my daughter's junior year. We soon realized we needed to cancel so we could take a college trip instead.
Ultimately, I am really glad we started during the summer before my daughter's junior year. In hindsight, perhaps we could have even done a bit during sophomore year to take some of the pressure off.
That said, you have to balance the need to visit colleges with your family's other life and travel priorities. And it can also add stress to an already-stressful process to stretch the college search out by starting earlier than necessary, so consider that as well.
3. Aim to visit when school is in session.
All times of year are not created equal when it comes to scheduling a college visit. The very best time to visit a college is when classes are in session. When students are on campus going about their day-to-day lives, it's so much easier for a prospective student to get a feel for what their own life would be like there.
That means the best times to visit are usually in the spring and fall, avoiding major holidays and school breaks. Most colleges have spring break in early or mid March (earlier than high schools in most of the country), so if your high schooler's spring break falls in April or even late March, it may align perfectly for a college tour.
If you can only visit during summer months, at least try to aim to visit when summer school is in session so the campus isn't totally empty. Avoid the final week or two of summer some time in August when new students are moving in for the next school year.
Summer is definitely better in my experience than winter break when campuses are locked up tight, every student has gone home for the holidays, and tours are almost never offered.
It can help to look at a college's academic calendar to make sure aren't visiting during a holiday or break that wasn't on your radar. For example, we found ourselves on the campus of Boston College on the Saturday of Easter weekend. While we knew official tours weren't available that day, we didn't realize it was actually a 4 day weekend for the holiday for the Jesuit university. As a result, the campus was a ghost town - and we weren't able to get as good of a feel for student life there as a result.
4. Try to take an official tour and/or connect with a current student.
The best way to get an in-depth look at a university pretty quickly and efficiently is to take an official admissions office tour. Admissions offices usually offer a combination information session and student-led tour to prospective students that take about 2-3 hours in total. It's easy to find these tours on the admissions section of a college's website and sign up to participate.
Some colleges also track a student's demonstrated interest in their school (which can be a factor considered during the admissions process), so that's another reason to register for an official tour.
If you can't take a tour through the admissions office, see if other university offices offer other kinds of tours, like the alumni association. You won't learn as much about the admissions process, but at least you can get an informed guide to walk you through the physical spaces on campus.
If you have connections to any current students at the college or university, reaching out to them can be incredibly helpful as well. Think of family friends with older kids already in college or ask your child's high school for recent alums who are open to being contacted. Current students might be able to give you a tour if you aren't able to do an official one, or they can serve to supplement what you've experienced on the tour.
One of my daughter's very best college visit experiences was touring Princeton, where the daughter of one of my husband's colleagues showed her around. She really made an effort to help my daughter connect with other students who were interested in many of the same activities that my daughter was interested in. This experience ended up offering a more in-depth look than she'd gotten at some other schools.
5. Plan your itinerary around tour schedules & book early before slots are gone.
Because it's important to prioritize admissions office tours, you really need to pay attention to when those are scheduled as you create an itinerary that will take your through multiple colleges. Very few schools offer tours daily, and some colleges only offer them a couple of times a week. Sundays especially are almost always blacked out everywhere, so weekend-only trips aren't often very efficient.
Additionally, tours during popular dates can also book up quickly. That means it's essential to get your ducks in a row early (ideally, a couple of months early in my experience) and map out an overall itinerary that fits with available tour times as well as one that makes sense geographically.
Many colleges have tours and information sessions available in the morning and afternoon. That means it's realistically possible to see two colleges in a single day in some instances, as long as the travel times between them are doable.
There are a lot of moving pieces to optimize, and I must admit I found it a bit like booking the perfect combination of Lightning Lanes at Disney - high executive functioning skills and a love of logic games definitely required!
For our spring break trip through the northeast, my daughter gave us a list of colleges in the area she was potentially interested in exploring. I then created a document with all the available tour times for each (I had to guess at some initially before schedules were released, as each school is on its own timeline for releasing this information and opening signups). The colleges were located from Boston to Philadelphia, so it was logical to drive roughly north to south or south to north hitting the ones in between. We debated visiting a few in upstate New York and some north of Boston too, but we realized drive time was too daunting.
It soon became obvious there were only a few itineraries that would work. Each one meant sacrificing an official tour at a couple of places. We ultimately picked the route where we could take an official tour at more of her top choices.
In the northeast corridor, we knew we'd have traffic to contend with, so we planned a route that combined a rental car that my husband dropped off mid-trip before switching to a few Ubers and ultimately, the train.
Think about things like parking when planning an itinerary as well. At Georgetown, for example, we learned that parking is incredibly hard to find. We needed to park in a recommended garage that was about a 20 minute walk from the meeting place for the admissions tour, adding significant time into our very tight agenda that day.
6. Book lodging within walking distance of campus, when available.
If you are seeing multiple schools on a longer trip, you'll inevitably need to stay in quite a few hotels along the way. While it may be a little more expensive, I highly recommend booking lodging within the heart of campus of a college you are visiting.
Often a lot of student life - shopping, dining, hanging out - is on display after hours in these adjacent business districts. Staying nearby helps you and your student get even more of a feel for university life after the tours are long over. It also gives you a great idea as to the walkability and safety of a campus after dark.
I booked The Graduate by Hilton Charlottesville which is on "The Corner" when we visited the University of Virginia. The location was right in the thick of things and allowed us to walk back to our hotel after a home football game, grab a few meals at restaurants students frequent regularly, and go shopping at the college store.
We also had great luck staying at the AC Hotel Chapel Hill Downtown which was just one block off of UNC Chapel Hill's famed Franklin Street. We went out to dinner at a local restaurant there (our waitress was a current UNC student who was happy to share her experience with my daughter), and then stood in line for the popular college froyo place.
7. Save money on college travels by maximizing miles and points.
All this travel probably sounds expensive, and it can be. But it doesn't have to be if you map out a budget strategy ahead of time. After all, you are going to need all the cash you can get when it comes time to send in that first college tuition check!
We did a lot of travel this year as part of my daughter's college search, but we actually paid very little out of pocket for the three cross-country trips we took. I redeemed frequent flyer miles (combined in some instances with my Southwest Companion Pass) for flights on two of our three trips. I used points or free night certificates for every single hotel we stayed in along the way.
College trips can be a great time to use points because often you might only need a hotel room for two people if you are traveling solo with one child. It can sometimes be harder redeem points for stays for larger families, especially in larger urban locations.
Just be sure to watch out for popular weekends like rivalry football games and parents weekends when planning travel. Redemptions may be blocked out or very expensive on those peak dates.
Free night certificates can especially be your friend. When we stayed at The Graduate in Charlottesville, it was homecoming football weekend. Using Hilton points for a stay that night would have required a whopping 160,000 points (and the cash rate was over $700). I was able to save a lot by redeeming an unrestricted Hilton free night certificate for the hotel room that I got as a benefit of holding the Hilton Honors American Express Aspire card.
Related: Best Credit Cards for Family Travelers
Amass a diverse collection of points in different programs which will give you a lot of options. For example, when we were looking for a hotel in Washington, D.C., I had a multitude of choices because I have points in Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG. There were numerous hotels close to where we needed to be.
We ended up booking the Hyatt Place Washington DC/White House because it gave me the absolute best value per point across all of those programs while being in the neighborhood we were targeting near George Washington University.
8. Carefully consider whether to bring along siblings - but involve both parents.
Because college tours can require some pretty significant travel time that may impinge on school breaks, the question inevitably becomes which members of the family should come along for the ride.
If you have multiple kids close in age, there are some efficiencies in touring colleges together. But if you have a significant age gap between your kids, younger siblings may be bored stiff sitting through session after session.
My son is 5 years behind his big sister in school, so it's way too early for him to be scoping out colleges. As a result, we made a calculated decision to spare him the pain of most of this process. I took the first two college trips with just my daughter.
And on the third trip to the northeast, my son joined us for just a couple of tours before he and I parted ways with my husband and daughter. We instead went to New York City where we saw a couple of Broadway shows while the two of them continued on through New Jersey and Pennsylvania to visit additional universities. Dividing and conquering was definitely the right call.
I do think it was wise though that both my husband and I each served as the primary accompanying parent on some college visits with our daughter. If your family situation is similar, consider prioritizing involving both parents in the process - or even a grandparent or aunt or uncle. Adults have different perspectives on colleges as well as traveling in general. It can be really helpful for more trusted adults in your child's life to be in the loop to give advice and offer input.
9. Do a little exploring beyond just tours and info sessions.
We have a lot of friends who spent spring break this past year doing a forced march through over a dozen colleges in a single trip, and some of their stories sounded pretty miserable and exhausting. Ours was exhausting enough! There are only so many colleges you can see day after day before it all blurs together and starts feeling like a real chore.
I'm very glad we took multiple college trips, as it meant we were able to break up the tediousness a bit more. We were also able to combine some regular travels with these college trips and have a lot more fun as a result.
In Virginia, we were able to go to a UVA football and volleyball game, visit with some old friends, and try a number of local restaurants. In Washington D.C., we reserved an afternoon to explore and walk the National Mall, see several monuments, and eat at the famed restaurant Old Ebbitt Grill. And on our northeast college jaunt, we spent Easter Sunday with extended family in Connecticut, ate way too much pizza in New Haven, stopped to visit my Disney Deciphered podcast co-host in Boston, and had an evening out as a family of four in New York City.
If it is your first time visiting some of these destinations with your kids, take some time to play tourist. School is about more than just the quad and the buildings on campus. Your child's life at a university will be shaped by the greater communities around them, so taking that atmosphere in is invaluable as well.
Final Thoughts
College visits have given our teen a chance to narrow down what really matters to her in a university and has also given our family some additional memorable travel experiences with her before her next chapter begins. My husband and I are very thankful we made these trips a travel priority this year. I highly recommend that other parents of teens make time for a few of these as well - and sincerely hope that these trips are more successful and affordable now that you've learned from our experiences!
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