Why booking a family holiday is horrible – and how to improve it

The problem with booking a family holiday

Last night, I booked a holiday. I remember a time when this used to be relatively simple – find the cheapest flight, pick out a decently-located, affordable hotel. But finding somewhere to stay as a solo traveller, or as a couple, is vastly different from finding somewhere to stay as a family.

The only conclusion it’s possible to make is that hotels and travel booking sites despise parents. Finding somewhere suitable for a family of four to stay is maddeningly time-consuming.

It’s not that suitable places don’t exist – it’s that they’re lumped in with many, many unsuitable places, with no efforts made to distinguish between the two.

The hotel room setup that families want

At the heart of this problem is a crucial truth – parents do not want to sleep in the same room as their children. This isn’t about meanness or even selfishness – it’s practical. Parents stay up later, and if kids are sleeping in the same room, the parents can’t really have a conversation or watch TV. Or, frankly, do anything other than sit in silence.

Also, in some cases which may or not be relevant to me, parents snore like a rowdy barnyard. No kid wants to attempt to sleep through that.

Parents don’t sleep in the same room as their children at home. Why on earth would they want to do so on holiday?

Family room
No, I do not want my children sleeping in a bed right next to me, thank you. Photo by Blake Woolwine on Unsplash

However, for safety and practicality, the children do need to be sleeping in a room next to where the parents are sleeping. This means one of two set-ups – interconnecting hotel rooms, or a two bedroom suite/ apartment.

To the uninitiated, this seems something relatively easy to find, right? Wrong.

The curse of the ‘family room’

If you search for accommodation for two adults and two children, you’ll get back a wild assortment of bad options, with the occasional good one hidden away. This is mainly due the plague of cynically-branded ‘family rooms’.

The search results bring up any arrangement that can fit four people in it. This will include rooms with two double beds next to each other, rooms with two bunk beds next to a double and – most often – rooms with a double bed and a sofa that can be turned into a very uncomfortable bed.

For one night, such a set up is just about tolerable. For any more than that, everyone’s going to hate each other pretty quickly.

Alas, you can’t just ignore these family rooms, as sometimes the property will also have a suitable two bedroom setup as well. You just have to click through to check whether this is the case, and whether the better setup is slightly more expensive or prohibitively so.

In practice, this means clicking through on every single hotel until you find one with an affordable two bedroom configuration. It’s tediously time-consuming, and largely defeats the point of the search results being ordered by price in the first place.

Filtering by two bedrooms

Hotel booking sites, notably Booking.com, have got better at describing what the room setup is. Some – booking.com and hotels.com – have also introduced a filter that allows you to state that two bedrooms are required, although I find this tends to filter out interconnecting rooms.

This is an improvement, albeit an imperfect one, but the package holiday sites are still utterly appalling for failing to differentiate between impractical ‘family rooms’ and the sort of accommodation families actually want.

Having to check out every hotel individually, filtering them out mentally, is not how it should work. And there’s a gap in the market for a booking site that can make this work relatively painlessly.

Bring on the biroom filter

Part of the problem here is the lack of suitable terminology. “Interconnecting rooms or a two bedroom suite/ apartment” doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? We need a term for it. Ideally, that would be “family room”, but alas that has already been taken and ruined. Biroom, perhaps? I am open to suggestions, and am not especially bothered what term we end up agreeing on as long as holiday booking sites allow me to use it as a filter.

Let me tick the biroom box. Please!

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