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We have started traveling with our kids. Luckily they seem to have inherited the liking of travel. In our no-kids travel era finding accommodation was never an issue. Now it has become a major concern. We are a family of four with the occasional additional company of other families.

Especially with company, finding accommodation is really difficult, except for the holiday parks, but in our opinion that has nothing to do with traveling. With hotels you are often limited to either really expensive suites, or fragmented rooms (sometimes connected through a door), mostly with only two persons per room.

We are planning to resume our old travel behavior, but hostels and B&B no longer seem an option, when traveling with small children.

Is there a good general search strategy for accommodation, when traveling with one or more families with (small) children?

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  • Where are you traveling? In Europe, I presume, based on your location?
    – Flimzy
    Apr 20, 2012 at 21:17
  • Not necessarily. I was more hoping for a more generic answer, if it exists.
    – user141
    Apr 21, 2012 at 6:26
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    Well, I know the answer will likely vary greatly based on location... as, for example, finding affordable lodging in the U.S., I have found, is completely different than finding affordable lodging in Mexico. In the U.S., online resources are the way to go for budget lodging. In Mexico only the more expensive hotels are online, so for budget lodging, you're best ignoring online resources in most cases. And in many cases, the cheaper, smaller hotels are just as nice, if not nicer, than the more expensive ones with web sites. I suspect the nuances for group lodgings will vary by location as well.
    – Flimzy
    Apr 21, 2012 at 6:42
  • @Flimzy You are right. I changed the tags by removing the online resources and budget tags. Affordability is of secondary interest. Most accommodation forms - cheap or expensive - are aiming at mostly offering single, double or triple options. When you are traveling with a family of 2 to 3 children even the cheap hotels turn out to be really expensive since you have to book multiple rooms. Since we are planning to travel through US in the near future it would be great to know what we should do when traveling through the US.
    – user141
    Apr 21, 2012 at 6:58
  • We have 3 kids, and when they were young we found that small B&B's could cope quite well with letting us use 2 rooms. As they have got older, hostels are a simpler cheap option, or for major trips we go with one of the larger budget hotel chains, which will let us sleep all 5 in one room. The room may be more expensive, but it still works out relatively cheap.
    – Rory Alsop ♦
    Apr 21, 2012 at 10:59

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Funnily, when backpacking in South America we regularly ran into hostels that had families staying there - like the one (Che Legarto?) in Iguazu - the kids kept hogging the pool table ;)

However, another option for you could be AirBnb - I was skeptical at first but it's now got a huge selection in most places, and includes rooms and entire houses for rent.

Another option is booking.com - great for searching by person/room size - you can say, sort all the results by price for those with 4-bed rooms. And it regularly seems to have some quite useful sales.

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