For family travel, there are a few hacks we like to keep in mind for getting affordable flights to our vacation destination. These hacks have helped us save money when purchasing all our flights with a baby or toddler.

Fly with a lap infant (your child flies free!)

Flying with a “lap infant” is something unique you can do until your child is 2 years old. If you’re flying close to your child’s second birthday, be SURE that your return flight is before they are legally 2 years old, for having them for free on your lap!

There’s a lot to consider about if you want to have your infant on your lap for the duration of the flight, but ultimately, it is a money-saver.

Our first three big trips with our infant between age 8 and 20 months were lap infant trips, so we only had to buy tickets for ourselves. This saved on the entire seat cost for our baby.

Lap infants and taxes

A final tip: keep in mind thats most airlines charge “Taxes” for a lap infant. We have experienced this as 10% of a ticket price. To jump straight to my list of the pros and cons of flying with a lap infant, head to How to decide between lap infant and buying a seat for your baby.

Fly mid-week and on Saturdays

Did you know there are days of the week when flights are traditionally a bit cheaper?

Saturdays

This doesn’t sound like rocket science, but the hack of flying on a Saturday has been a game-changer for us!

Consider this: most travelers like to be in transit on Fridays (to return home for the weekend) or on Sundays (to maximize time away). For us, we’ve found cheaper flights if we choose Saturday departures, or returns.

Mid-week

The same goes for mid-week: business travelers are always flying on Mondays, and long-weekend travelers are leaving on Thursdays and Fridays. Search for Tuesday and Wednesday flights as well, to find affordable family flight tickets.

Use miles and points

We’ve written at length about travel hacking: the bottom line is to use miles and points you have in your “bank” from airlines and credit cards, to get free tickets (only pay tax), or, get a discount off your flight.

We like to fly United and JetBlue. Both of those airlines have “milage pooling.” This means we can put our miles together as a family, even if they are in our individual accounts. We’ve both accumulated miles from various credit cards over the years and we always pool our miles to give us the most amount of options when we are searching for flights for the family.

We’ve flown with both those hacks, both by using saved-up miles for free tickets for ourselves, or, by getting a discount by applying points and miles.

Fly on budget airlines

If you can accept the no-frills experience, flying with budget airlines for short trips can mean affordable flight tickets for you and your baby.

One way to look at it is by saving on a sub-par flying experience, you can extend your stay by a night or two in your destination by using the same set budget.

We’ve flown plenty of budget airlines over the years, but never with a child. For short flights (under 2 hours or so) we’d have no problems with budget airlines. It doesn’t really matter that there are no meals or TVs. Our baby wouldn’t eat an in-flight meal anyway!

Keep in mind, though: flying economy in a 3-by-3 Airbus plane on one of these budget airlines like Spirit or Frontier may mean no TV-style in-flight entertainment for the duration of the flight. This means bringing all your own toys and child entertainment. (It’s been fine for us: we found that our baby/toddler didn’t care for the screens.) Read about what to do during the flight at our flights with a baby guide in this course.

Also keep in mind that budget airlines sometimes make up for cheap flights by charging a lot for checked luggage. Before booking or committing to the trip, check the price of the entire flight cost, with all of the checked luggage that you need (checked bags, travel crib, etc.).

Search for flights out of several airports

This is a great hack we’ve learned, as we live in the NYC area and we have three big international airports. We know this is not the case for everyone!

If you live within driving distance of two airports, search both for departures. By driving 60-90 min to the next-closest airport, you may find a MUCH cheaper flight; however, with a baby in tow, this becomes slightly more challenging with feeding, naps and other scheduling if you have more driving to do. Also keep in mind things like flight departure or arrival times, and hitting rush hour traffic on the way to the airport, or the way home.

Nevertheless, you may find a substantially cheaper set of flight tickets by traveling this way.

If you’re flexible with destinations, flights can be cheaper

We’ve taken trips by being pretty flexible: this means not being “married” to a certain destination. If we find that our dream destination has no cheap flights available, we reconsider!

By going off of “affordable flights” rather than “one single destination,” and by keeping an open mind, you can score affordable flight tickets for your family. We like to think that any trip is a great trip, especially when you have a baby and you want to get away!

Flying out of the country can sometimes even be cheaper, if you’re open to going, well, anywhere. We believe strongly in international travel, as you’ll probably gather from the content in this course. Head to Why choose international travel? to see our experience.

Try multi-city destinations

When we flew to Medellin, Colombia, we couldn’t find a great flight that would work for us. There was nothing nonstop from the first-choice airport closest to our house, and we didn’t want to fly at 6am if we did not have to. (That would mean getting to the airport at 4am!)

Instead, we decided to stop over in Florida and stayed with friends who live there! That worked well for us because we got to see those friends, saved some money on the accommodation and broke up the flights. We also got to see the beautiful Florida sun. 🙂

Instead of flying 6 hours nonstop to Colombia with our 14-month-old, we took 2 flights that were only 2.5 hours each. This was MUCH easier, even though it was a bunch of flying in 72 hours.

At the time, that’s what we were comfortable with and it worked for us.

You can try the same logic and see if you’d like to stay somewhere where you may have friends or family close by, and where you can round out your trip by seeing them either on the way there or way back. It also may make the entire cost of flights more affordable.