I am playing a family of five - mom, dad and 3 teenaged children. Mom and dad went on one of those free vacations for adults. In the meantime, I built a new house elsewhere in the town/world, and saved it to the library before moving anyone in. I went back to the family of 5, and the parents are gone. They still show up correctly in the family tree, and they show up in the relationship panel, but they are gone as active members of the household. Their images are gone. I k ow they are greeted out when they are on vacation, but they are gone gone - it’s now just a household of 3 teenagers. I tried to reset both parents, and nothing happened. Help! TIA.

Sorry to say that there probably isn't much you can do about that except revert to a prior save from before the vacation was accepted. The Generations adults go on vacation, teens party thing is broken and should never be accepted unless one is experimenting with it and fully expects to not be able to play forward once having done so. There are, I am also sorry to say, around 20,000 posts about this here and all over the web where players discuss TS3 (maybe a slight exaggeration). I do not know of any mods that are effective in getting that one to work properly.

Grown people also known as our favorite mod developers have looked at this issue many times over the years and they always have the same two reactions -- they either burst into tears or run away (or sometimes both).

So interestingly, this is the first time I’ve ever had a glitch with that free vacation, and I almost always accept it. Also interesting, mere moments after I posted this, the parents reappeared on their own. I actually tried to delete my post, but got an error here which said I didn’t have permission to do that... you win some, you lose some. But going forward, I will refrain from accepting the vacation. They probably got stuck at a time-share seminar anyway...

Maybe going into edit town to build on the other lot glitched out their travel. Glad it fixed itself but I have heard nothing but problems with that also, it is pretty lucky you haven't seen any problems till now and that it fixed itself.

If there aren’t any known ways to fix the free vacation or mod it, is there a mod to disable it?