I took my teens to an all-inclusive resort. It was a better family experience than the Disney Cruise we are used to.

02.06.2024 - 19:53 / insider.com / Cruise Line

I have two teen sons — 13 and 14 — and my husband and I have always prioritized travel and experiences over material possessions. This means we drive an older, mediocre car but spend money on nice vacations. Traveling allows us to connect outside our daily lives, and I also believe it reinforces cooperation and teamwork.

For the past five years or so, we've been taking our kids on cruises, usually to the Caribbean and usually on Disney Cruise Line. We typically don't see a lot of our teens on a cruise , which we've never seen as a negative. Don't get me wrong, we enjoy hanging out with our kids, probably more than they enjoy hanging out with us, but Disney Cruises has excellent teen programming, and my kids stay busy.

My husband and I appreciate the opportunity to have a little time together on a family vacation . I always thought we had a good balance of family time until we decided to switch things up and go to an all-inclusive resort on dry land.

We decided to go to Beaches Turks & Caicos , which caters to families. The price tag was comparable to a cruise, and the ease and time of getting there was about the same as getting from home to a Florida cruise port.

Besides the fact that there was more space and we weren't on a moving vessel, the vibe was the same. We looked at the resort's many pools and checked out the kid and teen areas. I expected my kids to ask to go off on their own and to give them a meeting time and place to reconnect with the family, as we would typically do on a cruise .

And then that didn't happen.

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We were at Beaches for five days, and while our two teens weren't attached to our hips the entire time, I noticed they sought us out more. They actually talked to us. Our family makes a habit of checking in via text no matter where we are, but this time, the "Hey, where are you at?" messages were more often initiated by my kids instead of the other way around.

Things at the resort moved at a more relaxed pace than on a cruise. In the mornings, we could sleep late and let the day unfold, versus having to be up early so we could get off the ship and squeeze every drop out of the experience of being in a new port. The slower pace was more conducive to enjoying each other's company without having to check vacation boxes.

Beaches was also way less video game-focused than Disney Cruise Line . My teens love video games, and while Beaches did have a video game lounge, my kids were, almost unexplainably, disinterested in it, choosing to hang with us or play air hockey or shoot pool in the arcade not dedicated to video games.

Whatever the reason, I'll take it.

While we enjoyed more togetherness than is typical of us on this vacation, we did allow our