Note: All travel is subject to frequently-changing governmental restrictions—please check federal, state, and local advisories before scheduling trips.

With the release of her fourth season of “Samantha Brown’s Places to Love,” travel expert Samantha Brown is focusing on traveling safely and responsibly. Filmed partly during the COVID-19 pandemic, this PBS show’s latest season is about providing travel inspiration for viewers at home while also prioritizing necessary precautions and safety measures. (Check your local PBS station for listings or visit the show’s website.)

Recently, Brown shared her insights with Travelocity on where to travel right now, how she prepares for trips with her family, and more.

RELATED: The one must-see bucket-list icon in every Mountain West state

As both a traveler and a mother of young twins, what are your recommendations for family destinations this summer?  

The Carolinas have just been huge. Maybe that’s because I live in New York City and it’s just far enough to feel like you’ve gone someplace somewhat exotic. You’ve got that space, but you also have the beach. So anywhere in the Outer Banks, it’s just been huge. And then I research it and sure enough, they’re already pretty much booking up for the summer, in terms of hotels, which is great to see. In Myrtle Beach what you have is just huge, massive beaches that go on forever and they’re long and even wide, so you know you’re going to have that distance of space. 

Photo Credit: Samantha Brown’s Places to Love

Southwest Florida is also doing really well because I think a lot of grandparents are there already and they want their grandchildren back, and a lot of people haven’t gotten to see their grandparents. So not only do you get that Florida vacation but you also get that reunion. Certainly, in my own life, and in my own corner of the world in travel, it seems like the Carolinas and Florida are huge.

What are destinations that Americans don’t visit enough but should?

Americans don’t give enough credit to our smaller cities, especially in the travel world. New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, even Miami, get all the travel credit. A smaller city gives you all the benefits that the larger city does—great food, great museums. What I love cities mostly for are public spaces, where everyone gets to share in the entertainment, the music, the playgrounds. You don’t have to pay to get into anything; that’s what cities are known for, that egalitarian nature that we all should have access to this, so I love that.

Some of my favorites: Asheville, North Carolina—we have wanted to shoot an episode there for years. Huntsville, Alabama [is] a great small city. And then there are other ones that maybe they’re not small, but they just don’t get that exposure like Dallas. Houston is not a small city but has 17 amazing museums, from the Holocaust Museum to modern art. There’s so much food. 

I wish and I hope that Americans start to pay greater attention to the benefits of going [to a smaller city] for an extended weekend and really just enjoying all of the exposure and all of the access, but with a lot of the stress level coming down.

Share with us a time where a trip didn’t go as planned but you made the best of it. What advice can you offer other travelers in similar scenarios?

[My husband] Kevin and I took our, at the time, three-year-old twins on a ten-day road trip down the California coast. And it was an amazing, magical trip, but one thing that I didn’t realize being such a new parent and a traveling parent, is just how exhausting it would be packing, unpacking, and repacking literally every two days. I was thinking, Whoa, I’m like what an amateur. And so that was difficult.

Photo Credit: Samantha Brown’s Places to Love

I think mentally when things don’t go right, the best thing to do is understand, this isn’t going right and I’m not going to fight it. I think so much of the pain of things not going well, is just our thinking and our expectation of how it should have been. And in travel, things go wrong all the time. Travel is not meant to be perfect. Travel does not go as planned. So it’s really good to get rid of that mentality, and just whatever situation you’re in, this is the situation you’re in. And a lot of times it proves to be a better situation when you just go with it, unless your life is in danger or something like that. 

Along with the essentials, what do you always bring with you when you travel?

For my kids now, I always bring notebooks. We’ll bring pens and markers and that’s going to be their travel notebook, and that helps us, too, because it gets a lot for kids to take in, and we all get tired at 3pm. We’re all just spent, right? We just need that break and just to kind of write or draw, or whatever they want to do, it’s incredible. I highly recommend it for parents of slightly older children, like in the six to 10 age range.

This one goes along the lines of essentials, however, you always want to travel with a good first aid kit no matter where you go. As a parent and even as a traveler, no matter where I am, I always think about what do I not want to run out and buy at a moment’s notice because I need it. That becomes Tylenol or acetaminophen; a thermometer to check for a fever. Maybe Benadryl, if there’s an allergic reaction. Trips to the drugstore, that’s not where you want to be on a vacation.

What is the one thing you always look for in a hotel stay and what amenities appeal to you?

I like convenience. Convenience for me is a great location that gives me access to things that I need and it doesn’t even mean that I have to be in the center of it all. Recently we were staying alongside a highway, and we were right next to an area where I could get food really quickly. That’s all I need. 

I also like a free hotel breakfast; that’s a huge thing for me. I love a small mini-refrigerator. I love an empty refrigerator so I can put some of my stuff in. Definitely, there’s that time when I get angry when they have the minibar fridge and you can’t even move an item. You can’t even put in a little thing of milk without being charged because you’re using the refrigerator.

And I do like a gym. I’m a gym person. Especially being a female traveler, you know maybe going for a run outside might not always be the safest thing or I don’t know the area that I’m in. A gym provides me that safety, which I like. 

What can you tell us about this season’s “Places to Love”?

I have a really unique episode called “How To Make Travel Count.” And it’s all my best advice; it’s very different. I’m not doing a location. I’m just talking about travel; my greatest travel tips. It’s all about the pandemic, and how we move forward with travel, and how travel does do everything we want it to do in terms of renewing ourselves and connecting with loved ones and creating new memories. It does all of that. But the most important thing you should do is to travel. So it really ties into people looking for travel and what they should be looking for.

Travelocity compensates authors for their writings appearing on this site; such compensation may include travel and other costs.

Pin It on Pinterest