Our family did it slightly better: Before college, our kid had been on an airplane for vacations twice – both times due to family obligations: The visitors (MIL and BIL’s family) specifically requested to have a destination union/vacation in another state. (For some reasons, they seem to have more vacation money than we do – it is likely because they live in a country where the college tuitions, health care and taxes are not as high as mine, and they have never had to pay any mortgage for their whole life.) Our kid only remembered the second time though because he was too young to remember anything for our first OOS vacation trip.
We do not talk to our kid about financing his education. We just do not think it is his concern; the responsibility is ours.
Wait…I take this back. For his post-college education, my wife did talk to him about it. It happened when she “promised” to him that his student loan indebtedness would not exceed a certain amount at graduation if he chose the supposedly more expensive school. (By and large, we have kept this promise, but we have achieved this with some luck, i.e., I continued to keep a job in most years while he was in school.)