Travel&Vacation

Taking the Kids

Cathy Denious and her 17-year-old daughter, Nancy, were thigh-deep in hot, sticky mud, but this wasn’t some exotic spa treatment. They were in a small Honduran village shoveling mud out of a pit to make adobe bricks. And when they weren’t making bricks, they were painting a day care center.

“It was very hard work,” said Denious, who is from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and she had never done anything like this before. Some vacation. The pair was at the work site by 7:30 a.m. and couldn’t even look forward to a hot shower at the end of the day. Their bare-bones hotel had no hot water. And they were paying as much for the privilege as for any luxury resort—more than $2,000 a person plus airfare—but mother and daughter agreed that it was worth every penny.

“When helping people, you just feel different,” explained Nancy Denious. “I could have worked for more days!”

The Deniouses had foregone their customary school break vacation, joining forces with three other moms and teens from their suburban community, volunteering with a Denver-based program called i-to-i that will send more than 5,000 volunteers to 35 countries this year.

“People are not doing this for a cheap vacation,” says spokesman Amy Kaplan. “They tell us they want helping others to become a way of life.”

Some, like the Deniouses, go for a week. Others sign on for much longer, often bunking with a local family, squeezing in sightseeing when they can. They teach kids English in Central America through programs like Cross-Cultural Solutions and Ambassadors for Children, do research on migrating gray whales in the Pacific Ocean with the Earthwatch Institute, build houses in Mississippi with Habitat for Humanity, and repair trails in New Hampshire with the Appalachian Mountain Club.

“Our family likes to do stuff, not just sit around on the beach,” explains Chicagoan Rose Thomas, whose three college-age daughters will be joining her and her husband, Andy, on a Habitat for Humanity project in Mississippi this spring, just after they celebrate one daughter’s graduation. The parent-child dynamic shifts too, she explains, as everyone learns new skills together. (Ready to roof a house?) “You feel such a sense of accomplishment when you leave,” she said.

What makes them do it? Maybe it’s seeing the relentless images of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in Indonesia. Maybe it’s the example being set by stars like Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. Maybe it’s the growing concern over the environment. One mom told me that her family volunteered in Guatemala because her child had been adopted there. For others, it’s simply the desire to share new experiences with nearly grown kids.

Whatever the motivation, using vacation time to help those less fortunate or to help the environment clearly has struck a chord with American families. The National Leisure Travel Monitor, an annual survey of travel habits, preferences, and intentions of active leisure travelers conducted by Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown and Russell and Yankelovich Partners, indicates that as many as 5 million households took some sort of volunteer vacation last year to support a humanitarian cause or help people in need. “This is the first time we measured this phenomenon and were surprised by how large the number was,” said Peter Yesawich.

At the same time, one-quarter of travelers surveyed by the Travel Industry Association said they were more interested in taking a volunteer or service-based vacation. Check the International Volunteer Programs Association website for an extensive database of opportunities abroad.

Urged on by employees, Travelocity now has partnered with several nonprofits to facilitate such trips in the United States and abroad, even offering $5,000 Change Ambassador grants to cover costs.

“Travelers want an authentic experience,” observes Travelocity’s Amy Ziff, who spent part of her honeymoon volunteering in an orphanage in Africa. “You come back more rested and rejuvenated than from another trip, and appreciate your own circumstances more.”

Ziff adds that interest has been phenomenal in the program. “This is tapping into being part of the solution, not the problem,” she says.