Flying baby photo by infinger2006

Sean Sutherland travels quite a bit and is fortunate to be able to take his wife and 3 kids (not pictured in the photo) along for the occasional family vacation. We think Sean’s comment ‘you could say my children are well traveled’ probably goes down as Flight Centre Travel Blog’s ‘understatements of the century’. Sean joins us with the first post in his Flying and Traveling with Infants blog series.

As some background, I have three children aged 5, 3, and 4 months. My eldest has flown from Toronto, Canada to Sydney, Australia on five occasions, twice to Europe, and across North America to Los Angeles and Vancouver. I guess you could say my children are well travelled. Recently my wife flew down with all three and met me in Jamaica where I already was on business. Most of our friends thought she was crazy. Not only did she need to get them all to the airport on her own, through check-in and security, and immigration at the other end, but there was a 2-hour bus ride in Jamaica to the resort where we were staying. I met up a few hours later – I am blessed, I know. I don’t profess to being an expert on the subject but thought our experiences could assist other parents.

Most airlines class an infant as under 2 years old and sometimes the child only needs to be under 2 on departure to qualify for the Infant rate for the return flight. The catch here is that they will not be assigned a seat but instead need to sit on your lap. We all know having an almost two year old (or even two month old) sitting on your lap for a few hours is not much fun, particularly on a long flight. There are also many questions relating to the safety so getting a spare seat can make all the difference. You have two options; you could just buy the seat at the standard rate or child fare or chance getting a spare being next to you.

Flying Monkey photo by Giant Ginkgo

Of course there are some things you can do to have better success with this. When making your booking, find out which flights have the most seats available and see if the one that does fits with your schedule. The more spare seats available the better your chances are of getting one. You can ask your travel consultant to give you an idea as they can see more details on seat availability than you can on a website.

When reserving seats, pick an aisle and window seat with an empty middle seat as most people will not choose the middle and thus they are last to be allocated. If someone does show up they are very likely to move to another middle seat to give you the spare, often without even having to ask. It’s less likely that someone will do the same with an aisle or window seat. Also, the cabin crew will usually look at moving anyone in between the two of you. Of course if they can’t move we will usually offer them the window after takeoff so we can sit together. And who knows, it is possible your child will have a melt down at some stage so a better seat can be a small payment for what the other person may yet experience. It’s important to note that even if you do reserve seats they are not guaranteed and they can get changed.

In the next Flying and Traveling with Infants blog post Sean will discuss bassinets, car seats, and strollers and clearing security and customs. Sean Sutherland is Flight Centre’s Global Ecommerce Leader.

Categories: Tips and Tricks

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 11:35 am and is filed under Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.