Airfare is half the trip so once you get there, the rule of thumb is stay as long as you can until someone misses you!
With almost a full day lost to flying, I'm with you there. My wife asked how long we were going for. I said "I have 4 weeks of vacation this year, how long will your parents watch the kids?" I think she thought I was kidding lol.
A full day? Are you in Canada or the US? Either way, our rule of thumb is: If it takes almost a day of travel to get there, add 2 days to the trip. We once went to Cozumel(which has no direct flights from here for some reason) and it was about 10 hours of travel. So we added to the time we were planning on staying. If I had your travel situation, I would do 9 days at TTR.
A full day of travel combined. Coming and going. And we're in the US, we will fly out of PDX and there are no direct flights, so best case is one layover. Flights are inevitably delayed, so I'm thinking 10 hours each way if we get lucky. I think it's like 7 hour of flight time.
With three kids and being hard to get the grandparents to watch them and get them to and from school/sports plus our jobs we only really get about 4 days there plus the two days of travel the grandparents will probably be pulling their hair out. Hopefully we will love every minute and be able to return longer the next time
We've done a mixture of 7 and 14 days, what ever, the worse part is still departing and having the A/I wrist band cut off...... stay as long as you can, only down side is trying to recover afterwards, the longer your there the harder the adjusting to reality is....... don't worry about the kids they'll be fine (LOL) May be there for 14 days next May/June, so may well see you there.... you'll have a blast
Our first (and until now only) trip to TTR was 10 days and that was a bit much for us (and we still had to go to Desire for 5 days). Mostly because of the alcohol and the same routine every night. But 7-8 days would be perfect.
Going on a trip to Cancun is a lot like the move "Groundhog's Day". You get up, eat, drink and hopefully make it until late in the night. The next day you get up and start the whole process over. I know that my middle age body can only take so much and no matter how hard I try I cannot do a lot of things I could when I was in my twenties. I've found the sweet spot to be seven days.
Our last trip we went 11 days (primarily to meetup with friends coming in at different times) and found it to be really too long. Somewhere between 7 and 9 is our sweet spot.
We've been for different durations 7, 10 & 14. 7 was DEFINATELY NOT enough time!!!! 14 was wonderful since we like to do excursions but unfortunately cannot always get away for that long. 10 days seems to be a good intermediate for us, can get in a couple of excursions and still not feel like the trip went by too fast.