We haven't taken an international trip with the kids since we went to London two years ago. And now that they're two and four, we decided we were ready to do it. So I used award tool and seats.arrow to set up a bunch of alerts from San Francisco and LA to major European airports, and we looked over the dates of the first kind of two weeks of that four week window.

Now, if you have the premium versions of either of these tools or a few others, you can set these alerts up really easily across a bunch of different destinations with all kinds of criteria from cabins to stops, to duration, maximum number of miles, maximum fees, and really, we didn't care where we ended up because we were only looking at direct flights from San Francisco and from pretty much every city in Europe you can get to direct, it's really easy to buy a short ticket from Paris or London or Frankfurt or Zurich to somewhere else in Europe.

So we were really flexible.