Hotel child policy: age bands, free places and extra beds

A hotel child policy is a written set of rules for four things: the age bands that define a child, how many children stay free with paying adults, the maximum occupancy of each room type, and the price of an extra bed or cot. It must name the date on which age is counted.

A family arrives late in the evening. The booking site sold the child as free up to six, the agency contract says six and under, and the child turned seven two days before arrival. Someone at the desk now has to choose between three documents and a tired parent. This article gives you the four decisions a hotel child policy actually contains, the date rule that prevents most of these arguments, the cost side of a free child in all-inclusive, and a template you can copy into contracts and rate plans.

What decisions does a hotel child policy actually contain?#

A child policy is four decisions written down: the age bands, how many children stay free and with whom, the maximum occupancy of each room type, and what an extra bed or a baby cot costs.

Age bands come first. You need an infant band, one or more child bands, then an age from which a guest is priced as an adult. Each band needs a price rule, not an adjective: free, a fixed supplement per night, a share of the adult price, or the adult price itself. “Children welcome” is not a rule; it is a mood.

Free places are the second decision. State whether the free place is counted per room or per booking, and which paying adults it is tied to. These two choices produce very different answers for a single parent with two children.

Occupancy is the third. Set it per room type. A double that takes a cot is not the same product as a double that takes an extra bed, and neither is a triple. An extra bed and a child sharing existing bedding are two different prices, because the cost to the hotel is different: a child sharing a bed uses no extra linen set, no extra bed frame and no extra floor space, though breakfast cover is still counted per person.

Board basis is the fourth. Say whether a free place covers the room only or the room and the board. In all-inclusive this single sentence changes the value of the concession more than anything else.

Write the policy as a rate rule the reservations system can apply, then write the guest-facing sentences from that table. A policy that exists only in a brochure cannot be priced, and a policy that cannot be priced becomes an argument at the desk.

Which date does a child's age count on?#

Choose one date and print it: the arrival date is the simplest rule and the one a booking site, a contract and a front desk can all reproduce.

The realistic options are the arrival date, the date of each night, the booking date, or a split stay. Arrival date is easiest to audit and to explain. Per-night banding is more precise and almost impossible to defend at 23:00 with a queue at the desk.

The birthday case decides your rule. Consider a child who turns seven on the third night of a seven-night stay. Decide once whether the whole stay is priced at the arrival-date band, or the stay splits into two rate lines. Splitting is defensible but creates a second line on the bill and a conversation at check-out. The arrival-date rule avoids both.

Booking-date rules fail quietly. If the policy says age at the time of booking, a child booked at six and arriving at seven becomes a dispute the hotel usually loses on goodwill. At the desk, ask for the date of birth rather than an age. A passport or identity card check is a verification step, and the document is personal data: record the band that was applied, not a copy of the document. For how long you may keep what you collect, see KVKK for hotels: notices, consent, staff access and retention.

Put the rule in the rate plan name and in the confirmation letter, so the guest can check it before traveling and the front desk is confirming a document the guest has already read. When you change the bands, publish a start date and apply the new table to new bookings only. Retroactive changes to existing reservations are the fastest way to lose an agency's trust.

How many children stay free, and in whose room?#

Free places are counted per room and tied to paying adults, so the rule has to be written per room type and per adult count, not as a single sentence for the hotel.

“Two children free when sharing with two paying adults” and “one child free per room” sound similar and behave differently. The first gives a single parent nothing; the second gives one free place. Single-parent bookings and one-adult-plus-children bookings are a common source of complaints, because the free place is tied to a second adult who is not traveling.

Free usually means sharing existing bedding. A free child who needs an extra bed is normally charged the extra bed, and that charge should be visible before the guest books. State the price of the second and third child as well. “On request” is not a policy; it is a queue of emails and a different answer from every shift.

Family configurations need their own line. A family of five is either one family room or two doubles, and the policy should say which room types accept which configuration, with the price of each. Agency and corporate bookings carry the same requirement: the contract must carry the same free-place table. If the contract is silent, the agency will apply its own reading and the hotel will absorb the difference.

What does a free child cost in all-inclusive?#

In all-inclusive the room is the cheap part: a free child still eats, drinks, uses water, laundry, pool and beach capacity and insurance, so the free place has a real cost per night.

Split the package before you discount it: room, board, and services. A child free on the room but paying board is a much smaller concession than a fully free child, and the guest should be able to see which one you are offering. The marginal cost items are unglamorous: food and soft drinks at cost, bottled water, laundry and linen, pool and beach capacity, animation places, insurance, and the welcome items nobody counts.

The larger cost is the bed. In a peak week a free child occupies a place that could have been sold, so the real cost of the concession is the displaced sale, not the plate of food. Season matters more than age band: free places in a quiet month cost little and fill rooms; the same places in the busiest week are the most expensive discount the hotel gives.

Keep the accounting honest. If board is free for children, board revenue per adult rises and room revenue per occupied room falls, which distorts any comparison of average room rate across periods. How to separate those two revenue lines is covered in ADR in all-inclusive hotels: separating room and board revenue.

Do not publish a discount percentage you cannot reproduce in the reservations system. A percentage that exists only in a campaign page becomes a manual calculation at the desk and an argument on the bill.

Extra beds, baby cots and maximum occupancy#

Occupancy is a property of the room type: write the maximum number of adults, children, cots and extra beds each room type takes, and price the extra bed separately from the cot.

A cot is for infants up to a stated age, is usually free, and counts against floor space rather than bed count. Say the age limit and say that cots are subject to availability, because a hotel with ten cots and forty doubles will run out. An extra bed is a real bed with a real price per night and its own age band. It also adds a breakfast cover, a towel set, a key card and housekeeping time, so the price is not only about the bed frame.

The limit comes from the room, not from the family. An extra bed changes the furniture layout, the escape route and the cleaning time, so a room type either takes one or it does not, and the answer should not depend on who is asking. Enforce the limit in the booking engine, not only in the text. If the engine allows three adults in a double, a booking site will sell it and the desk will inherit the problem.

Room type naming matters. “Double with extra bed” and “triple” are often the same physical room sold under two names. Decide which name each channel sees, or the same room will be sold twice under different occupancy rules. Mapping room types and rate plans across channels has its own checklist in Channel manager mapping: room types, rate plans and testing.

For example, an illustrative occupancy table might look like this:

Do not claim a legal maximum occupancy figure. Set your own limit per room type from the room's size, its furniture and your own safety arrangements, and confirm it with your local authority and your advisers.

How do you keep the same rules in contracts, booking sites and your website?#

The policy has to exist once as a table and then be copied, not re-described, into every channel, with each channel's age bands mapped to yours.

A booking site may use fixed bands of its own. If the platform offers infant, child and adult bands that do not match your contract, map band to band in writing and record the mapping next to the rate plan. Put the band in the rate plan name so the reservation arrives with the rule attached. A reservation that says only “child” forces the desk to look up a policy under pressure.

Attach the occupancy and child table as an annex to the agency contract. A paragraph inside the rate agreement is read by the contracting manager and forgotten by the reservations team. Keep the website wording and the confirmation letter aligned with the rate plan, not with the brochure: the brochure is written once a year, and the rate plan changes with the season.

Test with a real booking. Make a test reservation with one child at each band edge, on each channel, and check the price that comes back. A band that is right in the contract and wrong in the engine is wrong. A “children free” campaign is a fence, not a policy: it needs dates, room types, a board basis and a stop rule, or it becomes the policy by accident. Building those fences is covered in Hotel discount campaigns: a checklist for prices, dates and fences.

What should a child policy template contain?#

One page: a table of the rules, five sentences of guest wording, a version date, and the languages your guests actually read.

The table carries the age bands, the price rule per band, the occupancy per room type, the extra bed and cot prices, and the board basis of a free place. The five guest sentences answer: who counts as a child, which date counts, how many children stay free and with which adults, what an extra bed or cot costs, and what the desk will check at arrival.

Remove the phrases that hide a decision: “children welcome” without numbers, “on request” without a price, and “subject to availability” used as the only rule. For translation, have the guest wording written by a speaker of each language, keep the numbers identical in every version, and check the band names. A mistranslated band is a dispute in a language nobody at the desk speaks.

Put a version number and a date on the policy, brief the front desk and the reservations team on it, and keep the previous version so an older booking can be checked against the rules that applied when it was made. Set review triggers: a new room type, a contract renewal, a channel changing its band structure, or a complaint that reached a manager.

What to do next#

Write the table first, then the sentences: four decisions, one date, one occupancy line per room type, and one price for an extra bed and a cot. Then copy that table into the agency contract, the rate plans and the confirmation letter, and test one booking at each band edge on every channel. The order matters, because every later disagreement is a table that was never written down.