Get the full picture at Tingdene Holiday Parks.

A hotel stay suits a different kind of trip. If you want your meals cooked and cleared away without any thought, and you'd rather not do any washing up on holiday at all, that's a fair trade for a smaller room. Hotels also tend to sit centrally in towns and cities, so if your break is built around walking to restaurants, shops and evening entertainment on foot, that convenience counts for a lot.

If you've never stayed in a static caravan before, it's worth knowing roughly what you're walking into, because it's usually a pleasant surprise rather than anything to be cautious about.

None of these questions take long to ask, and any decent holiday park will have straightforward answers ready. If a question gets dodged or fudged, that's often more useful information than the answer itself.

Pace is worth planning around too. A multi-generational trip works best when the itinerary has some flexibility built in, a gentle morning walk that suits everyone, followed by an afternoon where younger children can do something more energetic while grandparents have a quieter few hours back at the caravan. Trying to keep every generation doing exactly the same thing for a full week tends to wear thin by day three.

Getting three generations away together takes a bit more planning than a standard family trip, but a holiday park set-up handles it better than most people expect.