--- title: "The Family Travel Blogs and YouTube Channels We Actually Watch" slug: "family-travel-blogs-youtube-channels-we-watch" description: "A full-time travelling family of five picks four family travel channels worth following in 2026, with socials and blog links for each and what each one is best at." author: "Adam Clarkson" lang: "en" date: "2026-07-28" published_at: "2026-07-28T01:47:42.000-04:00" updated_at: "2026-07-28T01:47:42.000-04:00" feature_image: "https://pub-7aaf5c6cc1c2496e8b9429b2cc0fe010.r2.dev/photos/large/51a02f5e-5d4e-4806-9e08-cf4ddee7e7ff.jpg" tags: ["Resource", "#no-brand", "#no-city", "#no-country", "#no-subregion", "#no-region", "Family", "Worldschooling", "#evergreen"] canonical_url: "https://adamandlinds.com/family-travel-blogs-youtube-channels-we-watch/" --- We have been travelling full time as a family of five since May 2022, and as of late July 2026 we are finishing up a three month stay in Da Nang, Vietnam. Somewhere in the middle of all that we stopped watching other travel families for inspiration and started watching them for logistics. These are the four channels still in our subscription feed, what each one is actually good for, and where to find them. ## What we want from a family travel channel Most family travel content is made for people who take one big trip a year, which is a completely reasonable audience to make things for. It is not us. The question we bring to a video is never "should we go here," it is "how badly is this going to go and what will it cost." That narrows the field quickly. A channel earns a spot in our feed when the people making it are solving the same problems we are, at roughly the same time, with a similar number of kids attached to them. The four below clear that bar for four different reasons, and only one of them overlaps with what we make ourselves. I also watch as someone who films. Most of our footage gets shot one-handed with a kid leaning on the other arm, which is how the Ba Na Hills cable car ride got filmed in June. When another parent pulls off a clean sequence inside a moving gondola, I want to know how they did it. ![Filming the Ba Na Hills cable car on 24 June 2026. Camera in one hand, kid on the other arm, which is most of our footage.](https://pub-7aaf5c6cc1c2496e8b9429b2cc0fe010.r2.dev/photos/large/51a02f5e-5d4e-4806-9e08-cf4ddee7e7ff.jpg) ## Steph and Pete Steph is American, Pete is British, and they met in a bar in Shanghai in 2008, which is a better origin story than most of us can claim. In August 2021 they were selected from more than 300,000 applicants for Airbnb's Live Anywhere programme and spent a year moving between listings with their son Hays. Between them they have been to over 75 countries. They claim Chattanooga, Tennessee as the permanent home, though they are based in Chiang Mai now. The reason we watch is the accommodation eye. Steph has a tourism background and books more short-term rentals in a year than most people manage in a decade, and it shows in how she talks about a property. She notices the things that decide whether a place works with kids in it, like where the usable floor space actually is once the beds are in. One useful quirk they flag themselves: the YouTube uploads run several weeks behind the filming dates. Instagram is where they post in real time, so treat the channel as the archive and the feed as the live version. (We might know a thing or two about that) **Follow them:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@StephandPete?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Instagram @stephandpete\_](https://www.instagram.com/stephandpete_/?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [stephandpete.co](https://stephandpete.co/?ref=adamandlinds.com) ## The Dufresnes The Dufresnes left Kelowna, British Columbia in 2017 for Costa Rica, spent a stretch in Thailand after that, based themselves in Da Nang for a year, and as of July 2026 are moving to Koh Samui with their two teenage sons and three chihuahuas. We know them from the Ekamai Beer house in Bangkok and the An Thuong strip in Da Nang rather than from the internet. Our expense tracker from our first Da Nang stint has an entry that reads, in full, "Beers with The Dufresnes." Their Vietnam archive is more useful now than it was when they were filming it. It covers a finished stint rather than a running commentary, so the calls they made about neighbourhoods and restaurants and visa runs all have outcomes attached to them. Their December 2025 run through northern Vietnam is the one we keep going back to. Nineteen days from the limestone karsts at Ninh Binh through Hanoi's Old Quarter to the cold fog in Sapa and the empty beaches at Dong Hoi, with the dogs left behind in Da Nang. That is close to a route we may run ourselves on our next return, and it is documented at a level of detail most channels do not bother with. **Follow them:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@TheDufresnes?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Instagram @thedufresnes](https://www.instagram.com/thedufresnes/?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/thedufresnes/) · [thedufresnestravel.com](https://thedufresnestravel.com/?ref=adamandlinds.com) ![Back at the Da Nang Beach sign on 17 May 2026, a few days into this stay.](https://pub-7aaf5c6cc1c2496e8b9429b2cc0fe010.r2.dev/photos/large/fb48468d-345d-4d36-9974-1dd14ec8ff2e.jpg) ## Bags Packed Family Jonathan and Kelly sold their house in Alaska and spent around nine years teaching internationally in India, the UAE and Indonesia before moving back to Alaska. They kept the Alaska place, but almost everything they film now is Southeast Asia with their three kids. The channel runs on food and ordinary daily life rather than on landmarks. What they do better than almost anyone is the unremarkable meal. Large parts of the channel are the five of them sitting down at a hawker centre or a market stall, ordering something, and reacting honestly, including the times it goes wrong. Their Kuala Lumpur video about ordering completely the wrong dish is a more useful introduction to eating in Malaysia with children than any list of top restaurants. The Kuala Lumpur to Penang train is the other thing they do well, where the useful part of the video is the price and the seat rather than the place at the end of it. **Follow them:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@BagsPackedFamily?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Instagram @bagspackedfamily](https://www.instagram.com/bagspackedfamily/?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@bagspackedfamily?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/bagspackedfamily/) ## The Backpacking Family Pete and Emma are British, both former teachers, and they took a one-way ticket to Asia in August 2021. They now travel full time as a family of five with Hudson, Darien and Florence, worldschooling on the road, which puts them closer to our own setup than anyone else on this list. Their site is a real blog with planning content on it, and their photography is the strongest of the group by a decent margin. Emma handles the visual side, which explains a lot about why their Instagram is worth following separately from the videos. The part worth taking from them is how they frame education. They treat worldschooling as something you do on purpose rather than something that happens by default because the family happens to be abroad, and that matches what we found after three years of trying to do it well. Two different Petes appear on this list and both of them are British. Steph's Pete is the one from the bar in Shanghai; Emma's Pete is the one with the backpacks. **Follow them:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@TheBackpackingFamily?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [Instagram @thebackpackingfamily](https://www.instagram.com/thebackpackingfamily/?ref=adamandlinds.com) · [thebackpackingfamily.com](https://thebackpackingfamily.com/?ref=adamandlinds.com) ## Four channels doing four different jobs Channel Currently based Main format Best for Steph and Pete Chiang Mai, Thailand Weekly vlog, plus a blog Judging whether a rental will work with kids in it The Dufresnes Koh Samui, Thailand Vlog plus long written guides Vietnam logistics and expat-level city detail Bags Packed Family Alaska base, filming in SE Asia YouTube only, food-led Working out what your kids will actually eat The Backpacking Family Full time, no base Vlog plus planning blog Worldschooling and travelling light with three kids ## Where our own stuff sits next to theirs None of the four leads with hard numbers, and that is the gap we ended up filling. Our budget videos exist because we kept watching great footage of a place and still having no idea what a week there would do to us financially, so we started publishing the receipts instead. The written side works the same way. If you want the arithmetic rather than the atmosphere, our post on [what full-time family travel actually costs](https://adamandlinds.com/cost-of-full-time-family-travel-real-numbers-2/) and the breakdown of [living in Da Nang as a family](https://adamandlinds.com/da-nang-cost-of-living-family/) are the two we point people at most often. Everything else on this list is better than us at making you want to go. FAQ ## Questions we get about this list Short answers before you go and subscribe to all four. Are you sponsored by any of these channels? No. There is no affiliate link, referral code or commercial arrangement anywhere in this post. These are the four channels we watch, listed because people keep asking us who we watch. Which one should I start with if I have young kids? The Backpacking Family, because their kids skew youngest and they cover the practical side of moving little ones between countries. Bags Packed Family is the better pick if the food is the part you are worried about. Which one is most useful for Vietnam specifically? Still the Dufresnes. They were based in Da Nang for years and covered the north of the country in detail, and that archive stays up even though they have now moved on to Koh Samui. Do any of them cover worldschooling? The Backpacking Family do, and they treat it as a deliberate practice rather than a byproduct of travel. Our own take on it is in our worldschooling guide. ### Related Reading [The complete guide to worldschooling](https://adamandlinds.com/the-complete-guide-to-worldschooling-everything-parents-need-to-know/) [Slow travel: how we learned to stop moving](https://adamandlinds.com/slow-travel-how-we-learned-to-stop-moving-and-love-staying-put/) [Why Vietnam is overtaking Thailand for nomad families](https://adamandlinds.com/why-vietnam-is-overtaking-thailand-as-southeast-asias-top-digital-nomad-destination/) We have no affiliate, sponsorship or financial relationship with any of the four channels listed here. Nobody paid for a mention and nobody knew this post was coming.