India Travel with Baby - Do I buy a seat?

Sudha

Best thing to do is check with the respective airlines on what is their policy? that always helps and clears off any doubts/confusion.Even some of the airlines have the policies for international travel published on their websites...so try checking the airlines websites!!

 

Go for the bassinet seat if your child will be able to fit into it. For example singapore airlines' bassinet holds a baby upto 30 inches in height and 30 pounds. You will pay 10% of fare plus taxes, and the kid gets to carry 1 check in luggage.

My son went to India at 18 months, and he met the above criteria but I still got him a seat of his own. reason being, whenever there is turbulence, the air hostess has you take the kid out of the bassinet and hold him, so I figured he would not be able to sleep and then bother me. Plus I could not fathom holding him in my lap for a 14 hour flight. Fares were cheap at that time and I got seats for the 3 of us for $3k on singapore airlines.

I think it was a good decision because it gave us room to spread out, plus he got to check in 2 luggages instead of one which was handy for carrying all his milk, food and diaper supplies.

What I also did was book the window and aisle seat in 1 row for him and myself, and put DH in the window seat in the row behind. This way, if no one was in the middle seat, he gets 2 seats to lie down on. And if someone came into the middle seat, we could ask them to exchange with my dh. We lucked out on the sfo-hk flights; no one was in the middle seat. But on the other flights, we were all together and it was fine to manage him as well. Luckily for us, he slept through most of the flights as well.