Booking a Family of Five at a Luxury Hotel

Two adults and three children is where luxury hotel booking stops being straightforward. Room occupancy at the top end is capped lower than most travellers expect, infants usually count, and the fix is rarely the one people assume. It is worth working through properly before you fall in love with a hotel that cannot take your family.

The cap is real, and the baby counts

Most luxury guest rooms are set for two adults, with a third guest possible in some categories and a fourth rarely. The cap is not front-desk discretion: it reflects fire and safety certification for the room, the bed configuration, and the number of covers the hotel has agreed to serve.

The detail that catches families out is that children count, and in most cases so do infants. Villa and residence operators say so explicitly, and city hotels generally apply the same rule even when a cot is being used rather than a bed. Booking two adults and two children into a room certified for three does not become acceptable because one of them is one year old.

Why the supplement exists

The extra-person charge reads like a penalty and functions as cost recovery: additional linen, an additional breakfast cover, additional amenity consumption and additional housekeeping time.

It is also more formal than it looks. Extra-guest charges are structured rate data rather than something invented at check-in: Google's own hotel rate specification carries a dedicated schema for them, which is a good indication of how standardised they are across the industry. Arguing the supplement at the desk is almost always arguing with a rate plan rather than with a person.

Two rooms or one suite: the arithmetic people skip

The instinct is that a suite must be better value than two rooms. Often it is not, and the reason is the benefits rather than the rate.

On several of the programs we hold, the included breakfast is calculated per bedroom rather than per reservation. Two rooms can therefore carry breakfast for four people where a one-bedroom suite carries breakfast for two, and on a week-long stay that difference is substantial. Some programs also apply the property credit per bedroom on multi-bedroom accommodation. A suite still wins on space and on having somewhere to sit once the children are asleep, which is not a small thing, but it should win on the full comparison rather than on the assumption.

The third option, and frequently the best one at European properties, is a one-bedroom suite plus an adjacent room rather than two standard rooms. It solves the occupancy cap, gives you a living room, and keeps the per-bedroom benefits.

Travelling with a nanny

This is almost entirely unwritten, and it comes up constantly. The questions worth settling before you book are these. Does the nanny need her own room, or is a connecting room acceptable to her and to you? Is she included in the breakfast benefit, which on most programs covers two guests per bedroom and therefore does not automatically extend to a third adult? Will she be eating in the hotel, and on whose bill? And does the property have a policy on staff accommodation at a reduced rate, which several resorts do and almost no city hotels publish.

Ask these in advance and they are administrative. Ask them at check-in and they are awkward for everybody, including her.

Europe caps harder than the Americas

A family of five who move easily through American and Caribbean resorts will hit a wall in Rome, Paris and Florence. Historic buildings have smaller rooms, stricter certification, and very little connecting stock, because fewer than ten per cent of a hotel's rooms connect at the best of times and conversions of old buildings usually have fewer still.

Plan European luxury around suites and two-bedroom accommodation rather than around connecting rooms, and start earlier. The small number of rooms in any given building that can take a family of five are booked a long way ahead.

Our position

Tell us the ages before we shortlist hotels, not after. The number of properties that can comfortably take two adults and three children in any given city is much smaller than the number that look like they can, and finding out at the booking stage costs nothing while finding out at check-in costs the trip. We would rather send you to the hotel that fits your family than the more famous one that does not.