The baby in business class debate always stirs the pot, and I’ve written in the past about why I travel with my kids, so I don’t intend to rehash any of that discussion. Rather, as my travel plans for the year begin to take shape, my award travel searches as of late have begun to spike and with that increase in activity I have been pleased to stumble on a couple of opportunities to save miles on family travel that I hadn’t previously known existed. While my summer plans will only require three seats if my younger son travels as a lap infant (note that I’ll have a separate post with more info on the best options for lap infant tickets), I am quickly approaching the point in my life where I will need four award seats for the foreseeable future, so ways to save miles on family travel (and in particular kids’ award tickets) have become of much greater interest to me. I hope that readers will also chime in with other programs that offer opportunities to save miles on kids’ tickets as the savings can certainly add up quickly as seen in a couple of examples below.
Saving miles on Child tickets via Air France / KLM Flying Blue
Interestingly, while most airline websites allow you to select whether passengers you are searching for are adults or children, I have (so far) only found one offering a discount on child award tickets. Air France offers a varying discount on child award tickets that works out to be pretty solid deal at 25% off on long-haul flights.
For instance, take this example flight with space in business class from Europe to the United States for 55K miles one-way:
The same flight would cost 110K for two adult passengers. But if you have one adult and one child between the ages of 2-11, the total comes to 96,750 miles for both passengers:
That’s a savings of exactly 25%. While that may not feel huge, it beats the zero discount offered by most airlines on child award tickets (and at a savings of 27,500 miles on a round trip itinerary, it certainly doesn’t seem insignificant). The vast majority of airline programs charge the same adult fare for any passenger occupying a seat, so this is a pretty cool program feature. I hadn’t previously been aware of this, though I later noticed that Toni Perkins-Southam and Dia Adams had included information about this in their Flying Blue Ultimate Guide at Forbes.
For my family of four, this would work out to a savings of 55,000 miles round trip with two child tickets. That’s a savings I’ll certainly have to consider over the next several years.
Saving miles with child tickets through Amex Travel
However, there is another way to save points on a child ticket that is perhaps more broadly useful: many non-US airlines offer child fares on revenue tickets. While that might not sound particularly appealing to those who primarily look for award travel rather than paid travel, this can make for a great deal for those who would book via credit card portals using points.
While this method isn’t technically saving miles, the difference may be without (much) distinction for those who would otherwise transfer points from Membership Rewards to an airline program to book an award ticket. Of course, booking via the credit card portal comes with some drawbacks. The COVID era has been full of horror stories of slow refunds after cancelled flights and hassles using future flight credit when that credit is held by a credit card portal. Paid tickets generally aren’t cancellable the way that award tickets are and even in cases where you can cancel, you’ll get stuck with a credit that is only valid for a year versus miles going back into your account with much greater flexibility. There are certainly some drawbacks, but the upside here is not insignificant.
This summer, I am scheduled to travel to Europe. I have another trip to Europe intended for the fall. I previously booked an award flight from the US to Europe this summer, but I still need to get back to the US from that trip (and then back to Europe later this year). Since business class fares departing Europe can often be cheaper than in the opposite direction, I am considering booking a round trip from Europe to the US and back to Europe. I was surprised to find some excellent deals on child tickets via Amex Travel.
To illustrate an example of why this can be such a solid deal, take this flight example: a date I searched on Google flights showed that my best two options were via British Airways at $1787 round trip or Air Canada for $1725 round trip per passenger (the search results below are for one adult):
Ordinarily, I would expect to pay those fares per person for each passenger over 2 years old and then I’d also be on the hook for around 10% of the adult fare for a lap infant. In total, based on the fair above, I’d expect the Air Canada itinerary to come out to around $5350 for my family of four (two adults, one child, one lap infant) or around $5500 on British Airways.
However, even Google knows that it will come out to a bit less when I enter the child and infant counts.
Here was the total price for 2 adults, 1 child (2-11 years old) and 1 lap infant on Air Canada via Google Flights:
British Airways came out to about the same price — a slight savings over what I expected with the quick math based on the fare for one adult:
But Amex Travel found an even better deal on Air Canada with an Insider Fare (access to Insider Fares is one of the benefits of Platinum cards).
Those tickets break down like this:
The deal above is solid. Consider that we have an Amex Business Platinum card, so if we use Membership Rewards points we will need 493,798 points to cover the trip today but we can expect to receive a 35% rebate in points (up to 1 million points back per year) on a premium cabin trip like this on any airline, meaning we would pay a net cost of about 321K Membership Rewards points total. That’s kind of like paying 107K round trip per seated passenger for business class between Europe and the US for the and getting the lap infant ticket entirely for free.
Amex Travel also had similarly cheaper-than-Google-Flights fares on a mix of Virgin Atlantic and Air France or Delta on the same dates and cities as above when considering child and lap infant fares.
Once again, those prices are the result of a child fare for the child between 2-11 years old being less expensive than the adult fares.
I was personally more intrigued by the options on Virgin Atlantic because of the fact that my younger son may turn 2 “during” the trip (we haven’t definitively settled on dates yet, but we will likely settle on a return to Europe that will have him turning 2 in between our summer trip to Europe and the “return” leg of this trip which flies back to Europe in the fall). I previously noted that while most airlines will require your newly 2-year-old to have a ticket for a seat for any flights on your itinerary that occur after their second birthday, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways will actually let you ticket them as a lap infant and given them a free seat on the return leg if they turn 2 during the trip. That means we’d potentially end up with four seats on the return leg, making for an even better deal.
I found similar child ticket opportunities on a number of airlines. This is something I hadn’t previously considered but that might make booking via credit card portals considerably more interesting to me over the next couple of years.
Bottom line
While this may be old hat to those who have been traveling with a family for years, it was a surprise to me that child tickets come at a 25% discount via Flying Blue. I further hadn’t realized that many foreign airlines offer pretty significant discounts on child tickets in business class (I’ve been aware that SAS has periodically run a deal where “kids fly free”, I hadn’t been aware of more broadly-available child discounts). That can make booking through a credit card portal a potentially very attractive deal, especially in cases like the examples in this post where you may end up paying less than the cost of an award ticket without being bound by award availability (and also earning miles on your paid ticket). That last part is not to be ignored: earnings on paid flights on foreign airlines like Virgin Atlantic and British Airways can make another significant dent in the net cost when credited to the right programs.
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Nick, I just purchased 3 award tickets (2 adult and 1 child) from CDG-BOS with the sale AF is running. We did not get 25% off the child ticket. Does it not apply when they are running an award sale?
No, it applies. Is your child between two and 11 years old? Did you search for three adults versus for two adults and one child? It doesn’t show a number with something crossed out displaying the 25% discount, you’ll just notice that if you look up the price for three adults versus two adults and one child already baked in automatically.
For instance, if it shows a price of 55,000 miles per adult, it’s going to show a price for the three of you of 151,250 miles. You do have to pick child out of the drop down instead of adult (the search tool defaults to an adult when you add an additional passenger, so you have to pick child out of the drop down)
Please explain the seatbelt you seem to have around your son. Did you MacGyver something or purchased it?
I’m on mobile right now and maybe one of the images isn’t loading, so I’m not sure which image you’re talking about, but it had to be something provided by the airline as we don’t have kind of belt to go around a lap infant. Many of the European airlines provide a lap belt that essentially attached the child to your lap belt — like the adult’s lap belt goes through a loop in a second lap belt that goes around the child, so it basically just keeps the child fastened to you. The European airlines that have provided that have said that it is required (not sure whether that’s required by the airline or by some European regulation).
We do also have a CARES harness for our older son (though he hasn’t been on a plane since pre-pandemic, so he was a lot smaller the last time we used it). But that would be for when the child has their own seat. It’s worth getting one once they are old enough as it feels a lot more secure. I highly recommend buying it directly from the company (I can’t remember the site right now!) rather than buying on Amazon or something as there are a lot of knock-offs out there (we bought a second one because we lost a buckle from it or something and we needed it quickly, so we ordered from Amazon and it was made to look almost identical, but it wasn’t quite the same even though it was supposed to be the real deal).
FYI Qantas does not charge ANY mileage for a lap infant. Just taxes…
[…] in Business Class: Saving Miles on Child Award Tickets: Check out this post on Frequent Miler. When we flew home from Russia with our toddlers, we paid less for their tickets on Korean Air. […]
You can book hotels/resorts that are adults only, why this can’t be a thing on planes I simply do not understand. I would pay more to take a flight guaranteed to be child free, it would subsidize family travel. I’ve never understood why this isn’t a thing. Obviously not scalable but certain routes or red-eyes being child free could be lucrative for any airline that offered it.
For those of you who would say it’s discriminatory, minor children are the single class of people that legal discrimination exists without issue. Children can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes, can’t buy real property, can’t have credit, etc etc etc etc.
Triggers a lot of parents for some reason that they might not be allowed to take their 9 mo old on a transcon red-eye, but we’d probably all be better off if it were an option.
Flame away.
I think there is no doubt that some people would pay a premium for this, but I imagine that if the airlines thought there was enough market in it to make a profit, they would have offered it long ago done it. The fact that they haven’t tells me that they either have run the numbers and decided that it isn’t worthwhile for them or they can’t do it for some regulatory reason.
I have to imagine that most of an airline’s business is business travelers, whose companies probably aren’t interested in paying a premium for employees to take a childless flight (even if those employees may prefer it, which I don’t think is unreasonable), or the other main market segment leisure travelers, the majority of whom are families. So I’m not sure there is enough of a market to support regularly scheduled flights.
Again, I am 100% sure that there are others who feel the same that you do on that, but I’m not at all sure that there is enough of a market segment to sell 3 or 5 or 7 flights a week on multiple routes, and I imagine the airlines are aware of that. I also wonder whether it may have something to do with some kind of regulations governing mass transit and nondiscrimination statutes? I understand that there are many things that children are not legally allowed to do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some regulations saying that those who provide transportation services (whether buses, taxis, planes, or trains) can not discriminate based on certain factors and it wouldn’t surprise me if age were one of them.
Regardless, I get the desire and it’s a piece of feedback that I’m sure airlines have received, so the fact that they haven’t done anything with it tells me they don’t want to or can’t for some reason.
You likely don’t have the miles because you can’t transfer miles in from the major players, but Lufthansa’s Miles and More program also offers 25% off children award tickets (for those aged 2 to 11). I recently took advantage of that for my two kids.
And while Lufthansa gets a bad rap for the YQ it tacks on, you can pay more in miles to save on fees. This doesn’t always help, but for my trip, the choices were either 56k miles + $843 or 73k miles + $28. I would much rather pay the latter (especially when some of that increased mileage cost is offset by the 25% child award discount). Not bad for nonstop West Coast USA to Europe flights.
Good to know! I figured some of the European programs offered discounted child tickets (I think I read that SAS does also), but since there isn’t a practical way for most people to get the miles I didn’t delve into programs that weren’t transfer partners with the major currencies. Lufthansa’s program certainly has some good values — if they would partner up with a US transferable currency, I think they’d be a lot more popular. I know they have a credit card, but that’s a slow path to enough miles for a family trip. Glad to hear it has worked out for you though!
Good to know. As for Lap infant, Aeroplan lets you redeem 10% of the miles for award ticket (in lieu of 10% of paid fare) which is especially helpful on oneway Star alliance/partner bookings where the paid rates can be astronomical.
Aeroplan is actually even better than that — it’s just 2,500 miles or $25 CAD for a lap infant (about $20 USD). We wrote about it a couple of years ago here:
https://frequentmiler.com/lap-infant-award-tickets-for-less-new-aeroplan-fee-is-25-cad-or-2500-miles-all-classes-of-service-partners/
Perhaps you were thinking of Asiana, which does charge 10% of the mileage cost and is a Star Alliance program. British Airways also charges 10% of the mileage fare and there are a number of other programs with good flat rate lap infant tickets. Like I said, that’ll be a separate post.
“many non-US airlines offer child fares on revenue tickets.”
In 2019, I found cheap economy flights and took my family of 6 to SYD (from ORD via LAX) on AA metal. I booked via AA so I could use up a bunch of GCs, but the same prices/flights were for sure available to book via Chase (at the time I had CSR and could get 1.5 cpp). Three of us age 12+ booked at ~$460 while the other three age <12 booked at ~$340. I do not know what the policy was to get that discount – region-specific, AA overall, etc. – but I did not complain to get the reduced child price :-).
Of course the lack of travel during the 2+ years of COVID has pushed two of those age <12 into the age 12+ category now, so I only have 1/6 left who would potentially qualify for a discount.
I got a great deal on Qsuites last fall with Amex Travel. $2800 RT JFK-AMM with the second leg labeled first class and that entitled is to Qatar’s incredible first class lounge. Deliberately chose a long layover for this experience. Saved about $400 over google flights for same exact flight.
Great article. TAP’s program (TAP Miles & Go) also gives children’s discounts (25%) on miles tickets, as long as the flights are on TAP’s metal. Both coach and business. I’ve taken advantage of this discount a few times.