Free child places: how they really work, and how to find one

A free child place can take several hundred pounds off a family holiday. It is also the most misunderstood offer in the market, because the word free is doing a lot of work.

✓ Last checked 20 September 2026 By Oliver Jones Independent — we sell nothing

What is actually free

On a package holiday, the price is built from three things: the flight, the accommodation and the transfer. A free child place makes the accommodation element free for one child. Everything else is still charged.

So the child still costs you:

• their seat on the aircraft
• air passenger duty and taxes
• their baggage, if it is not bundled
• their transfer, in most cases

That is not a criticism of the offer. On a two-week summer package, the accommodation is often the largest of the three, and removing it entirely for one person is a genuine saving. But a family expecting a child to travel for nothing will feel misled at the payment screen, and that is avoidable.

The rule that explains everything else

Free child places attach to a specific hotel on a specific departure date, and there is a fixed number of them.

Not to a destination. Not to a month. To one hotel, one week.

Once you internalise that, the rest of the behaviour makes sense:

• Why the offer vanishes between the search and the booking screen — someone else took the last one.
• Why the same hotel has one in the second week of June and not the first.
• Why “free child places available in Majorca” is marketing rather than information.

How to actually find one

Searching the way most people search — fixed dates, one destination, sort by price — is close to the worst method available, because you are filtering out exactly the flexibility that finds these.

Search a window, not a date. Most operators let you flex by a few days either side. Widening from one Saturday to “any departure in the first fortnight of June” multiplies the number of hotel-and-date combinations you are looking at, and free child places live in those combinations.

Compare the same hotel across neighbouring weeks. Find a hotel you like, then price it week by week across a month. The saving between adjacent weeks is frequently larger than the difference between two different hotels.

Work the shoulder. Late June and early September carry peak-season weather with a fraction of peak-season demand. Availability of these offers is dramatically better, and if your children are not yet school age, this is by far the biggest lever you have.

Book early, then keep looking. Availability is best when a season first goes on sale, because nothing has been taken yet. But operators also release unsold allocation later, so a second look about ten weeks out is worth the time.

Compare totals, never per-person prices

This is the part that costs families the most money.

Package holidays are advertised per person, based on two adults sharing. A free child place changes the per-person average in a way that makes the headline figure look dramatic while the total moves less than you expect. Meanwhile a competing hotel with no offer may have a lower total.

The only comparison that means anything is: the full amount payable, for your actual party, on your actual dates, with baggage included on both sides.

Does flying from Belfast help?

Yes, modestly, and for a structural reason. These offers are allocated per departure airport. A base with a deep programme has more hotel-and-date combinations in the pot than one with a handful of weekly flights, so there are simply more chances that a free place lands on a week you can use.

It does not make the offer more generous. It makes it more findable.

Where to point that flexibility

If you can move your dates, it helps to know which destinations reward the shoulder season most. Two from Belfast stand out:

• Majorca — late September still has a 25°C sea and the island empties the week the schools go back. The shortest transfers in the Mediterranean, too, which matters with tired children.
• Málaga — the airport train removes the coach transfer entirely for four of the main resorts, and October keeps a 22°C sea.

If you cannot move your dates at all, the lever is gone and you are back to comparing totals. That is still worth doing properly: see how package holidays work, and check the hand luggage rules before you assume two quotes are comparable.

The short version

1. Free means the accommodation element only.
2. Availability is per hotel, per date, and capped.
3. Flexible dates find them; fixed dates do not.
4. Shoulder season beats peak on availability, every time.
5. Compare totals, not per-person headlines.