Families

45 islands built for families rather than tolerant of them. The test is capacity and structure: rooms that hold four without a rollaway, a club with staff rather than a room with toys, shallow water at the beach, and food a child will eat without a negotiation.

Scale is what makes it work, which is why this series overlaps heavily with Island Worlds. A hundred-villa island can fund a children's club, a teenagers' annexe and a second pool; an eleven-villa island funds none of them and should not pretend otherwise.

The genuine advantage of an island for a family is not the programme but the boundary: there is nowhere for a child to go, no road, no traffic, and the whole property is supervised ground. Several parents in this register's correspondence describe that as the only holiday where they stop counting heads.

Not for travellers who want the island quiet. A family island in August sounds like one, and the records say so rather than leaving it to be discovered on arrival.