Christmas present to Thailand with four teenagers

It happened one afternoon during a glass of wine. My husband and I have spent the last five years buying investment properties and saving every cent to do so. I bought up the conversation about what we wanted for the future. Yes we had two great houses that we were proud of, but were we really enjoying our lives to the fullest. We hadn't been overseas for 7 years since our honeymoon and I had the urge to go again. I think we realized that we weren't doing enough exciting and adventurous things, so after a few more wines we were going overseas. We were both excited and I'm not sure if it was the wine talking, but I said "do you think we could take the kids". Our kids have quite often mentioned, so and so from schools family are going overseas on the holidays, and we would always reply, we'll it must be nice to have money, but this time after working out our finances, we were going to take Them. Now we new that this holiday wouldn't be cheap as we have 4 daughters aged 11,13,15 and 20, so Thailand was where we chose and it would also be a great Christmas present surprise.
We decided that we would go in the June school holidays 2013, this also being our three youngest daughters first time on a plane. As we wanted to give this to them as a present, we went full steam ahead into planning it. Talk about doing our heads in. There were so many hotels and things to choose from, I just didn't know where to start. I googled lots of info and signed up to the lonely planet thorn tree to follow what advise other people were giving. Let me tell you it's not easy finding accommodation for 6 people and with all the web sights and forums I looked at regarding traveling with teenagers, it was very few and far between. We decided not to go through a travel agent as they were a lot more expensive and by booking it ourselves it gave us a lot more freedom to look for specials and cheap airfares.
We began thinking about what kind of experience we wanted our children to have. I know it was high on our list to let them see for themselves just how fortunate they were living in Australia. We considered how much traveling we wanted to do once we were there and the best areas we could go to in our 16 day holiday. The search begins. 😁