Booking One Room for a Family of Five

Most rooms are built and licensed for four people, which is why a family of five hits a wall that a family of four never sees. The usual answers are a room genuinely built for five, two connecting rooms, or a suite. Which is available depends far more on where you are going than on what you are willing to pay. Call +1 (323) 800 6001 and we will find what actually exists for your dates.

This is one of the most common reasons people give up on booking a trip themselves and phone us instead. Search results show rooms that claim to sleep five, the booking fails at the last step, and there is no explanation. The reasons are straightforward once somebody sets them out, and so are the ways around them.

Why most rooms stop at four

It is rarely about space. Three things set the limit, and none of them can be negotiated at the desk.

• Safety regulations. Occupancy is capped by local fire and safety rules, based on exits and the room itself. A property cannot exceed it even if the room looks large enough, and this is the limit that never bends.
• How the room is built. Two double beds is the standard family configuration across much of the world, and two doubles is four people.
• How booking systems are built. Many systems simply do not offer a fifth occupant on a standard room, so the search returns nothing rather than explaining why.

The practical effect is that a family of five is not a slightly harder version of a family of four. It is a different search, and it often needs a person rather than a website.

The four things that usually work

In rough order of how often they are available.

• Two connecting rooms. Two standard rooms with a private door between them. The most widely available answer and usually the most comfortable, though it means two rooms rather than one.
• A family room or a quad with an extra bed. Genuinely built for five, common in some countries and almost unknown in others.
• A suite. A separate living space with a sofa bed. Works well, though the fifth sleeping place is often the sofa.
• An apartment or villa. Frequently the best answer for five or more, particularly for a longer stay, and often overlooked entirely because people search for rooms.

Which of these exists is largely a matter of geography. Some destinations are full of family rooms; others have almost none and the answer is always two rooms or an apartment.

Connecting, adjoining and adjacent are not the same word

This distinction causes more disappointment than any other in family booking, and the words are used carelessly.

Connecting rooms have a door between them, so you move from one to the other without going into the corridor. That is what most parents of young children actually want. Adjoining or adjacent rooms are next to each other with no door between. Nearby means on the same floor, or sometimes merely in the same building.

Here is the part worth knowing: connecting rooms are very rarely confirmed in advance. Most properties treat them as a request, allocated on the day, because they cannot know which rooms will be available. A booking that says connecting is usually saying that the request has been noted.

What we do about it is ask the property directly, put the request on the reservation in writing, and tell you honestly how likely it is. If a property will not commit and you have young children, we would rather steer you somewhere that will than let you find out at check-in.

Ages matter more than you would expect

How a property counts children changes what you can book, and the thresholds are not intuitive.

An infant under two is often not counted in the occupancy at all, so a family of five with a baby may be treated as four. A child above a certain age is counted as an adult, and that age varies between properties from about twelve to about sixteen. Teenagers are therefore the group most likely to break a family room arrangement.

Cots are almost always a request rather than a booking, and some rooms cannot take one because of the floor space rules. If a cot matters, it needs asking about specifically for that room type, not for the property in general.

Tell us everyone's age when you call. It is not a formality. It changes which rooms are available to you, and occasionally it turns an impossible booking into a straightforward one.

The options side by side

What each arrangement is really like for a family of five.

What to ask before you book anything

Six questions. Ask them in these words and the answers will tell you whether the trip works.

• What are the actual beds in this room? Not the stated capacity. The beds.
• Is the fifth sleeping place a proper bed or a sofa bed? For a week, this matters.
• Is a connecting door confirmed, or requested? Ask for the answer in writing either way.
• From what age is a child counted as an adult here?
• Can this specific room type take a cot?
• If we book two rooms, is anything charged per room rather than per booking? Resort charges and taxes often are.

If you are comparing properties, those six answers separate them faster than any photograph will.

How we find rooms for five

We search differently from a website. Rather than asking for a room that sleeps five and accepting the empty result, we look for family rooms, quads with an extra bed, suites, connecting pairs and apartments at the same time, and then tell you what genuinely exists on your dates.

Then we call the property. We confirm the bed configuration, put the connecting request in writing, check the cot, and check whether anything is charged per room rather than per booking, because two rooms can attract two resort charges and two tourist taxes. That is the sort of detail that decides between two options that looked identical.

Families of six, seven or more are easier than five, oddly enough, because at that size everyone is looking at apartments and two-room arrangements anyway. Five is the awkward number.

One further thing we check, which almost nobody thinks to ask about: where the rooms sit in the building. Two rooms on the same floor but at opposite ends of a long corridor is a different holiday from two rooms side by side, and with young children it is the difference between an arrangement that works and one that does not. We ask for them to be placed together and we say plainly whether the property has agreed to try or simply noted it. The same goes for a room near a lift, near a pool, or away from a late-night bar, all of which are worth requesting and none of which appear in any search result.

Call us with your dates, your destination and everyone's ages. If you would rather write it down, send it through our vacation request form and a travel expert will call you back.

How booking by phone works

1. Call +1 (323) 800 6001 at any hour and speak to a travel expert.
2. Give us the details: the traveler's full name exactly as printed in the passport, date of birth, passport number and expiry, the home city, the US city and the dates that would suit.
3. Hear the realistic options: the routings, the total, the cabin, the connection times and the change and refund rules, explained before anything is booked.
4. We book it and email everything to you and to the traveler, request the assistance and meals, and stay reachable 24/7 while they travel.

Why book with Fond Travels

Fond Travels, LLC is an independent US travel agency in Woodbridge, Virginia, booking travel since 2017. We are not tied to one airline or booking site, so we compare the routings side by side and tell you which one actually suits the person traveling. We are rated 4.8 out of 5 by more than 2,500 Google reviewers and we answer the phone around the clock, which matters when a flight goes wrong at three in the morning in another time zone. Read how booking by phone works with our team.

Related pages

• Family travel booked by phone - how we handle trips with children.
• Vacation packages - destinations arranged as one booking.
• What a package includes - including what is charged per room.
• Group travel - once the party reaches eight or more.