About

Help choosing where to take the family.

We score holiday destinations the way a straight-talking friend would: by what actually matters for a trip with kids, built on real data.

Why it exists

This site started with 10 open tabs. We were trying to pick a family holiday: destination guides in one tab, hotels in another, then booking platforms, Google Maps, the Blue Flag register and a couple of review engines. We asked AI too, and got walls of confident text that changed with every prompt. It was hard to see the wood for the trees.

What we wanted was a one-shot view of the destination itself, with a rating a family can read at a glance. The hotel matters, and the review sites cover it well. The destination is the other part of the story, and it can make or break the trip: the difference between an OK holiday and an amazing one. On one trip (we won’t name the place) the hotel was great and the town let it down: hard work with a pram, a lovely-looking beach with waves that made swimming with small children stressful, and an atmosphere that never quite relaxed.

Rob has always quantified his way to a decision: ranked shortlists for hotels, restaurants, even films. When we went looking for the same thing for family holiday destinations, it didn’t exist. So a side project started, first for our own trips, and evolved into what you’re reading now.

How the scores work

Every rating is produced by an engine from open data: maps, climate records, Blue Flag registers, places data, and shown in plain English: a verdict from Outstanding down to not a strong fit. A firewall in the code means nobody here can set a rating by hand, so what you get is one data-backed ranking. Where the data is thin, we say so.

See exactly how we score →

Where we cover

We’re building the catalogue destination by destination - beach towns first (the Algarve, Fuerteventura, the Venetian Riviera), with lake, mountain and city destinations to follow. Wherever a family holiday could take you, the plan is to score it the same way.

How we make money

When you book through a link here, we may earn a commission from the travel partner, at no extra cost to you. It never moves a score and it never reorders a list: the engine can’t see who pays us, and the best option is shown even when it pays us nothing. The full version, in plain English →

Who’s behind it

Destinations for Family is built by Makappen Limited, an independent studio in Winchester, run by Rob Smith - dad of 2 young children and an obsessive researcher of holidays, his own and everyone else’s. He builds it with his wife Carolina, an equally avid family traveller with Brazilian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian roots and a firm preference for sunshine. Rob, being roughly 80% Devon and Cornwall, starts wilting after a couple of hours of it. Every destination here has to work for both of them, and for the kids. The site is the spreadsheet energy of our family holidays, opened up for yours.