Kids Kollaborate

Big Five Tours Kids Kollaborate Study

Here we go again… Big Five is creating another new challenge for itself. On Saturday, March 17, Big Five had its inaugural gathering, which at the moment is dubbed the Kids Kouncil. The event took place in our headquarters and was composed of six children between the ages of 6 and 20 years of age, who are all related to Big Five employees. Two of them joined in via Skype.  We took a really cool video at the end of the meeting about that experience that you can watch here.

Why? Well I promise it wasn’t to hold them captive or deprive them a fine Saturday morning outdoors.

As many of you already know, we have a family collection of trips called Precious Journeys, which features activities and hands-on learning experiences specifically tailored for children.

As we began to look for new adventures and options for this select collection, the idea was born to have a meeting for and run by kids – no adults allowed. We came up with a short list of questions for them to discuss.  The oldest member of the team served as the moderator.

The objective of this exercise was to get real answers from the children directly, without the adult filter, to discover what is important to children today. We did not focus on travel much but rather on what each child looked for and valued. Questions ranged from what was the best day you ever had, to what was the grossest food you ever ate.

The only rule was that wherever the conversation went, the adults would not interfere in any way. They weren’t even allowed in the room, except for a silent Ashish to take some pictures.

We realized this was a bit risky as we did not know what to expect. Would they all sit there mute? Would the run around and talk video games?  Would we get any useful data from this experiment?

But it wasn’t long before we saw that these kids had a lot to say about the world and what they expect. We learned more in two hours than we could have learned in a couple of lifetimes. What we think and what kids think are miles apart. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, parents must be from Mercury and kids from Pluto!

Over the coming months, we are going to use what we learned to fine tune our process for family trips, and build our next Precious Journeys adventure. We are going to make family travel more purple as some of our friends in certain parts of the US would say. This goes back to one of our primary ideas that travel today is as much about why and less about where – even with kids.

We were impressed by how enthusiastic these children were and how eager they were to do it again. So we have decided to make the Kids Kouncil a formal part of the Big Five process and we are expanding the group to include children from outside our circle.

This is where you come in.  We are looking for a name for our gathering. We have five choices listed below, which our kids came up with. Watch their video on our Facebook page and cast your vote in the comments section.

1. Kids Kouncil
2. K Kids
3. Voices Council
4. Kids Options
5. Kids Opinions