How to Find the Best Family-Friendly Accommodation

I’ve booked hotels for our family of four across more than a dozen countries at this point, and hard truth is most hotels are not built with your kids in mind. They’re built for the business traveler on a two-night stopover or the couple celebrating an anniversary. And your family gets whatever’s left over.

Fortunately, among the sea of business hotels and luxury getaways, there are options out there that have that exact mix of space to spread out and functional utility that make a stay family-friendly. You just have to find them.

What Makes a Place to Stay “Family-Friendly”

While I’ve seen a lot of people mention that they want a place where the staff greets their kids, I personally don’t care whether the staff takes notice of my kids or not. Instead, when I’m looking for a place to stay, I care a lot more about whether the space we’re paying for has what we need for it to actually work for our family.

This is the place we retreat to after a full day of exploring. It’s where we spend our downtime and the hours that don’t show up on any itinerary. And on our longer stays, it’s where our work happens: blog writing for me, schoolwork for the kids.

It needs to be a place where we feel comfortable to exist, not just a place to sleep.

Choose a Location That Makes Sense for Your Trip

Finding the best room in the city doesn’t matter if it’s an hour from everything you’re there to see. Before I book, I map out roughly where our days will be spent and look for something that balances travel time with amenities.

If you’re planning on staying in a place longer, sometimes it can absolutely be worth finding a less-expensive option farther out from the center, but if you have limited time in an area, you absolutely want to minimize the time you spend traveling!

Walkability matters too. Being able to get to a decent meal or a corner store without loading everyone into a car or a taxi makes the evenings a lot easier. Unless you plan on spending the entire trip inside your hotel or resort, the quality of your stay depends as much on what’s in walking distance as much as what your room looks like.

Get a place with space to spread out

A cramped room turns a family into a pressure cooker fast, especially once kids are old enough to have opinions about personal space. I look for stays with a separate living area if we can get one, or at minimum enough square footage that four people aren’t climbing over each other’s suitcases.

How much space you need is directly related to how long you’ll be staying in the room. For an overnight stay, a cramped room might actually be fine, especially if you’ll be spending most of your day exploring. But after a week? A room that felt fine for one night can start to feel real small after a few days.

In general, if we’re spending longer than a week in a single location, we start looking for apartments or homestays instead of hotel rooms. Less than a week and we can make do with a couple beds and a nearby coffee shop.

Amenities Your Family Will Actually Use

It should surprise absolutely no one that hotels do their best to pad out their amenities list with every single thing they offer to try to make their place look better. But the vast majority of amenities listed on hotel pages end up being things that should be the bare minimum for a stay (say, shampoo) or things that won’t make a difference to our trip, like access to an onsite restaurant. We may eat there in a pinch, but I specifically chose a place with nearby dining options for a reason. (See choosing a location that makes sense, above.)

So what amenities are we checking for? Here’s a quick list:

• Free Wi-Fi. This one is the big non-negotiable for us. Not only do we work online, but we use internet for everything from the kids’ school work to a weekly family movie night. And, even if you have a decent mobile-data plan wi-fi is going to save you data.
• A full-kitchen or kitchenette. Yes, you can eat out for every meal on your trip, but that gets expensive quick, especially with a family of 4+. The ability to prepare your own food lowers costs, gives the kids some familiar flavors in a new place, and makes mornings way easier if your kids are late risers.
• A minimum of 2 beds. This feels like an obvious one, but it’s definitely worth checking. Two twins trumps one king for family travel. Roll-away beds work for overnight stay where they’re a novelty, and our kids will argue over who gets the roll-way vs. who has to sleep in the boring, old bed.
• A desk or table. On longer stays, this is where the blog writing and schoolwork happen. But even on short stays, having table space is welcome!
• A pool. This isn’t as important on a short trip where you plan on spending every waking moment out exploring, but it’s a life-saver for a 24-hour layover in a city you’ve already explored or for longer trips where you have some downtime.
• On-site laundry. Whether we’re in a place for 3 days or a full-month (or longer!), we typically travel with about a week’s worth of clothing. For shorter trips, that’s more than enough, but for longer trips having the ability to do laundry on-site makes things way easier. It’s not a deal-breaker if a place doesn’t have this, but there have been times in our travels where I’ve hand-washed a week’s worth of clothing using a bucket, so a washing machine is something that I’m happy to see at a hotel.

A Price That Won’t Break the Bank

Family trips are going to cost more than solo travel, plain and simple. Extra beds, extra space, and extra square footage all come with a markup. The trick isn’t finding the cheapest option, it’s figuring out which extra costs are actually buying you something useful.

Paying more for a kitchen that saves you three restaurant meals a day is worth it. Paying more for a fancy lobby is not.

And remember! Location has an impact on price, as well, since a cheaper place further away from the activities you want to do ends up costing more in transportation!

How I Find Our Family’s Stays

I don’t trust star ratings and I don’t trust the top result on a booking site. Here’s what I actually do.

For the booking itself, Booking.com is where I like to start most of the time. They have filters that let me narrow down my search by type of stay, room budget, and specific amenities, which saves me from scrolling through a hundred listings that were never going to work for us anyway.

I also like to check the hotel’s own site, not just the third party booking pages. Photos of the actual room layout, how many beds actually fit in a room built for four, whether there’s a kids’ or teen-friendly menu. Third party listings flatten all of this into a few bullet points. The hotel’s own site usually has the details that decide whether the stay works for us. This matters most when you’re planning something specific, like a family staycation in Manila, where location and family-focused amenities can make or break the trip.

Depending on your specific destination, there are also often region-specific sites that work well, too! For instance, Agoda.com is an excellent choice for travelers in Asia, but it doesn’t work nearly as well in other regions.

Booking Tips That Can Save You Headaches

If you’ve got a bigger group, you’re choosing between one large suite or two adjoining rooms. Adjoining rooms tend to win out for us. Everyone gets a door they can close, but you’re still one knock away from each other.

Once you’ve picked a hotel, call them directly. Confirm the room layout. Ask for something away from the elevator or the ice machine, both of which are louder than you’d expect at 6am. Request the extra bed in writing if you can. A five minute phone call has saved us from more than one surprise at check-in.

Finding the right place to stay often takes a bit more digging than just simply clicking the first result. But the work you put into finding that perfect stay is the difference between a trip where you’re constantly managing chaos and one where you actually get to enjoy the time with your kids.