Flick through the pages of family brochures these days and you may notice a lot of grey hair around. It's not all mothers with perfect bikini-clad figures and Colgate-bright white teeth brandishing golden-haired babies. Tour operators are taking large numbers of bookings from family groups which include grandparents as well as mum, dad and kids.

A holiday is a chance to spend time with your extended family (or so all the marketing guff goes) and grandparents are handy as free babysitters. The over-fifties also happen to be a lucrative lot for the travel industry. Hence we're all getting sold on the idea.

If you had suggested when I was a teenager that I'd ever holiday with my par ents after the age of 18, I would have been insulted. Who'd be seen dead travelling with their parents when they're old enough to have shaken them off? Yet 15 years later I've come full circle and find it's quite nice going away with my parents. Yes, really.

Their habits that irritated me as a teenager are now endearing. My dad still can't pass a church or museum without peering in (however hot, tired and hungry the rest of us are) and mum likes to ask us what we'd like for lunch before we've digested breakfast. Maybe it's less fun for my husband who's still learning the foibles of the Hydes, but I know how he feels when we holiday with his folks who compete for diary space.

What none of these brochures dares mention is the complexities of extended family holidays. The bigger the group, the bigger the compromises.

First you have to co-ordinate diaries. Grandparents like to travel out of school holidays when fares are cheapest, but most kids attend school, so you're forced to travel when villas and hotels are double the price.

Then you have to agree on the type of holiday. One side loves self-catering (me, because no worries about Rome taxi meter-style multiplying bills), while mum-in-law loves hotels (self-catering reminds her of her spartan post-war days and she takes comfort in marble lobbies with tinkly pianos).

When we stay with his parents in a hotel we always argue. Resort hotels tend to be scattered, villa-style, where baby listening devices don't work. You have either to take baby to dinner with you, or eat at 6pm and go to bed at 8pm. My in-laws say you should lock the kids in and not worry. But I always fear fire, burglars and the like.

There are no romantic dinners t te à t te , because Markus rarely sees his parents and insists we all eat together. Then I insist on bringing Hanna, 2. And she insists on sitting on my lap and throwing food everywhere. I get lectured on how working mothers today don't know how to bring up children. By the end of it all I can't wait to get back to work...Now we're cooking up a new plan. Get grandparents to take grandchild away. Husband and me go elsewhere.