Walk around Disneyland or Dollywood during a weekday in, say, early November, and you’ll see school-age children seemingly everywhere. With no school holidays in sight, how could this be? Are they playing hooky? School trip? Nope: It’s parents pulling their kids out of school—and picking experiences and good deals over perfect attendance.

More parents than ever (myself included) take their kids out of school multiple times per year in order to travel. For me, it’s not about theme park trips; it’s about education that goes far beyond the boundaries of our school zone or even our state. I have brought my kids to Morocco in October, Iceland in mid-March and Portugal in November. And I’m not alone in prioritizing school-year travel: A 2025 report from the travel company Zicasso found that more families than ever are booking trips (largely educational ones) during the school year. Requests for family trips in May, for example, more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, according to their data.

But school-year travel isn’t just for enrichment; it’s also because the modern school calendar has become financially (and, frankly, emotionally) unsustainable for many parents. With peak holiday airfare and hotel costs pricing families out of travel during school breaks, many find that a midweek break in early February might be the only affordable option. A spring break trip in 2025, for example, cost an average of $8,306, more than twice the price in 2019, according to Bloomberg.

Instant Insights /

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