Originally Posted by
JamesEaston
Depending on how many kids you have, and their ages, the Algarve might be better. Ian is right that it's only a beach destination but down there you'll find a fantastic water park, one of the best in Europe, and other kid friendly things to do along with beaches, water sports and lots of good golf courses.
Obviously if your goal is not a beach/golf holiday with the kids, you can ignore everything that I just wrote
Thanks. While I'm going with our teenage children, we don't go to Europe to visit water parks (plenty of those in the USA), so no Algarve for us.
BTW, I remembered that Melia likes to throw "temporary" points into members' loyalty accounts (there are a couple threads on this on flyertalk), and we have a few Melia accounts that each had 12,000 free points. There are about a dozen Melias in Portugal, so I booked some very inexpensive rooms (averaging about 5 euro) for my family. Not necessarily the hotels I would have chosen at full price, but certainly decent 4-star properties. Portugal is turning out to be a very inexpensive family vacation for me.
