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Having done a lot of travel with my kids, including nearly a month-long Interrail, with all-day travel days, you have to learn how to be savvy with keeping both yourself and the kids entertained during these times. Just picture this. You're three hours into a train journey, the kids have already worked through their snacks, the card games have lost their charm, and the tablet battery is blinking red. Sound familiar?
Family travel can be full of these in-between moments. The waits at airports or train stations, the long drives, the evenings in a hotel room when everyone is too tired to go out but too wired to sleep. Often, the easiest option is to fill those gaps with screens. But as time goes on, an interst with screens, esepically while travelling, can be short-lived. Screens, as useful as they are, are not always the option, there's an engaging option that gets pulled out of suitcases less often than it should.
Books!
Reading on holiday isn't just for solo travellers with a poolside lounger. With a bit of intention, books can become part of how your whole family travels. Here's how to build the habit into your trips without it feeling like homework.
Why Reading Belongs in Family Travel
Long travel days are exhausting for kids and parents alike. Screens help, but they leave everyone a bit fried by the end of the journey. Reading does the opposite. It calms restless energy, fills time without overstimulating, and gives families a shared quiet activity that doesn't require Wi-Fi or charging cables.
There's also something lovely about the way books and trips become linked in memory. The novel you read on a London city break stays attached to that holiday forever. The picture book your child loved on the ferry becomes "the boat book" for years afterwards.
Reading turns travel downtime into something memorable instead of something to get through.
Picking the Right Books for the Trip
The books you bring matter more than you might think.
For younger children, pack a mix of familiar favourites and one or two new picture books. Familiar stories soothe at the end of overstimulating days. New ones become a treat to discover. Library trips before a holiday are brilliant for this. You can borrow a small stack without committing to buying anything.
For older kids and teens, there is a huge range of YA books, and if they need some variety and choice, then a Kindle or e-reader is worth considering. One slim device holds a whole holiday's worth of reading without weighing down a backpack. Audiobooks are the underrated hero of long car journeys, too. The whole family can listen together, which beats arguments over playlists.
For parents, pick something you actually want to read. Not the worthy book you've been meaning to get to. The one that feels like a treat. Holidays are for that.
A Reading Bag That Travels With You
Here's where I'll let you in on a small parenting truth. The bag you carry on travel days matters almost as much as what's inside it.
A dedicated bag for your books and reading bits keeps your novel separate from the sticky snack wrappers, half-empty sunscreen tubes, and whatever treasures your kids have collected from the floor of the car. It also means you can actually grab your paperback or Kindle when a quiet moment appears instead of digging through chaos.
Sturdy canvas, denim, and corduroy literary tote bags hold a paperback, Kindle, and notebook comfortably, and they double as a day bag once you arrive. Look for one with reinforced handles and enough room for a bookish essential or two beyond the reading itself, like a small journal or your reading glasses.
Bonus: a good bookish tote is easy to spot in a sea of black backpacks at the airport.
Building Reading Into Travel Days
A routine works better than good intentions.
Try a chapter on the journey before the screens come out. Twenty minutes of reading before lights-out at the hotel, no matter how late you got back from dinner. A bookshop or library stop in every new city, the way some families seek out playgrounds or ice cream.
Museums slot in beautifully here. Most have wonderful gift shops with children's books tied to the collection, and a quiet bench inside the building is one of the best reading spots a family will ever find. Cafés work the same way. A morning pastry and twenty pages while the kids draw is a holiday memory in itself.
The trick is making reading feel like part of the adventure rather than a substitute for it. Pull books out at moments that already feel slow. The train is pulling into a station. The hour before dinner, when everyone is hungry, but the restaurant doesn't open yet. The first morning of a holiday, before anyone has decided what to do.
These are the moments your kids will remember.
Reading Souvenirs Beat Plastic Ones
Most holiday souvenirs end up in a drawer within a month. Books don't.
Make a habit of picking up one book from every destination. A local children's book in translation. A novel set in the city you're visiting. A secondhand paperback from an English-language bookshop abroad. These become physical reminders of trips that actually get used long after you're home.
For kids, a book bought on holiday carries a different weight than one from the supermarket. It becomes "the book from Paris" or "the one from Granny's town." That association lasts.
Making the Routine Stick After You Get Home
The best part of a travel reading habit is what it does to your everyday life.
A family that reads together on holiday tends to keep reading together at home. The bedtime chapter becomes a year-round thing. The Saturday morning library trip becomes a ritual. According to The Reading Agency, reading for pleasure has measurable benefits for children's wellbeing, empathy, and academic confidence, and habits built in relaxed settings tend to stick.
Consider keeping a small shelf at home just for "trip books." Pulling one down on a rainy Sunday brings back the holiday faster than any photograph.
A Final Thought
Years from now, your kids won't remember whether the hotel had good Wi-Fi or which restaurant you went to on the second night. But they might remember the book you read aloud on the ferry. The chapter that ended just as your train pulled in. The bookshop in a foreign city, where they picked something out themselves.
Reading on holiday is one of those small, quiet things that turns out to matter more than it should. Pack a book. Pack two. Make space for them in the bag and in the day.
The rest takes care of itself.
