Flying cheap with kids: how exactly do you do it? Where is the best place to look to book an airline ticket? What things should I consider when booking airline tickets for the family? What is the cost of airfare? All are questions families may have when booking air travel with kids. In this travel blog, we give you some golden tips so that you never pay too much for an airline ticket again. We list them here for you.
Flying cheap with kids: 9 super good tips
#1 Let the price determine the destination
When we were booking our world trip, we had certain destinations in our minds beforehand that we wanted to fly to. We were sure we wanted to start in Dubai and at least travel to New Zealand .
The website where we often look first for airline tickets is the search engine Skyscanner and this search engine allows you to enter the outbound destination (Dubai in our case) and enter anywhere as the final destination.
When we did the search we found that we could fly from Dubai to Sri Lanka for less than 100 euros. We started looking up some information about Sri Lanka and were immediately excited. From Sri Lanka we did a similar search and there it turned out that we could fly to the Maldives for less than 100 euros. We thought that was absolutely fantastic too and nothing could be further from the truth
So we ended up flying from Dubai to Sri Lanka, to the Maldives, to Singapore, to fly from there to New Zealand for very little money. Be flexible and be surprised by the results of the search engine.
#2 Look at multiple airports nearby
It can be much cheaper not to fly from the Netherlands, but from Belgium or Germany. We ourselves live in Brabant and for us the airports of Brussels and Düsseldorf are as close as Schiphol.
This expands our search area and allows us to search through multiple airlines for the cheapest ticket. Even at the final destination, you often have several cities, which are flown to. Look at your travel itinerary in the country in question and determine which destinations you can all fly to.
#3 See a stopover as an enrichment and not a burden
When we looked to see if we could fly directly from the Maldives to New Zealand, we found that it could only be done cheaply via Singapore. We had never been to Singapore, so we attached a week of Singapore to visit this country with our daughter as well. As a result, we still had two direct flights without a transfer and were given an additional destination on our trip as a gift.
Of course, this can only be done if you have enough time so that it does not detract from the final destination you wanted to go to.
#4 The timing of books
Many studies have been done on this and research shows that tickets are cheapest if you book about six weeks in advance. If you are very flexible and do not necessarily want to go to a particular destination, then you can stick to this rule, but if you are planning a world trip, for example, then you will want to book your airline tickets a long time in advance.
With most airlines, though, the rule is that it’s better to book far in advance than very short notice. Do keep in mind with your searches that most airlines don’t start selling airline tickets until 10 months in advance, so if you start searching as early as a year in advance, not all tickets may already be available. For a long trip, six to eight months in advance is an excellent time.
#5 Enter all family members in the search right away
To get the right price for a family airline ticket right away, it is smart to enter the whole family in the search right away and not on just 1 adult. Several airlines give kids a discount on a seat, so that can change the total price.
Suppose you are looking for a plane ticket to Dubai and search on 1 adults then KLM may charge 500 euros for a plane ticket and Emirates may charge 520 euros. If it turns out that Emirates offers a 50% discount on a seat for kids, you’ll spend 1560 euros on Emirates for two adults and two kids and 2000 euros on KLM. Therefore, make sure you get right to the right family members including ages in the search engines.
#6 Don’t always trust the search engine
Don’t blindly rely on the search engine that checks the prices of different airlines, but do your own research. For example, the English Wikipedia allows you to see which airlines all fly to a particular destination by entering the airport in Wikipedia. Some airlines may not be named through the search engine, but may have a better price.
On several occasions, for example, we have thought that a certain destination had no direct flight from our destination, only to find that a small airline was flying there.
#7 Be creative with search
Flights from certain Caribbean places to the Netherlands are often quite pricey. If we enter the tropical island of Dominica with final destination Amsterdam, the search engine indicates that no flight connections are possible.
From Dominica, however, you can take a cheap boat to cross to neighboring Guadeloupe and Martinique in a few hours. From these two countries we can fly to Paris for 200 euros per person and for an additional 50 euros to Amsterdam with a transfer in Paris.
You can also attach another weekend in Paris to this and take the train from Paris back to the Netherlands. Let your creativity run wild and you will see that many more options are possible, than you think of beforehand.
#8 Set a price alert from a search engine
Of course, you don’t feel like scouring the Internet every day looking for cheap tickets, which is why search engines like Skyscanner have a price alert feature. You can set these up for a particular flight and then you’ll be notified by them when the prices have dropped (by one of the airlines).
So if KLM just announced its worlddeal weeks and as a result your intended ticket suddenly drops by a few hundred euros, you don’t have to keep an eye on this yourself and you will receive an instant notification.
#9 Compare a whole vacation with single tickets and a single hotel booking
If you are only traveling to one destination, it may be cheaper to book an entire vacation with one of the travel providers than to book everything separately. Travel companies generally purchase thousands of seats at a time from an airline and also thousands of rooms from a hotel chain and, of course, receive a large discount for doing so.
So it may be that an entire vacation is therefore cheaper, than booking everything separately. In addition, of course, it is a lot less arrangement if everything is arranged for you. Therefore, compare the total price of both options to see which is the cheapest option.
Cheap flying with kids: provider airfare
The first step, of course, is to figure out where you want to fly the family. If you know this then it’s fine to first look for yourself on a website like
If you put a little effort into it, you can save hundreds of euros on a family trip, and that’s nice! Especially if, for example, you are going on a world trip with the family and need to book many flights.
