travel industry is increasingly biased against the child-free holidaymaker

A number of exclusive hotels in the Maldives recently announced that they had decided to open their doors to children. Good news for parents, not such good news for anyone who’d rather not have children careering around the swimming pool.

The fact is that the travel industry is increasingly biased against the child-free holidaymaker. The big summer-sun tour operators admit that families are better for business: they are far less likely to book at the last minute and are usually forced to buy holidays in the expensive peak-season periods.

On the other hand, the travel operators don’t want to miss out on the adult market, so they pay lip service to couples and singles by selecting top-end hotels with limited family appeal and sell them as “exclusively adult”. But there’s rarely any guarantee they actually will be child-free – unless a particular hotel is sold only by a single tour operator, the hotelier is free to contract out some rooms to another operator on a different basis – and, therefore, may well be taking bookings from families. Another problem is that at smaller, boutique-style hotels, the policy on children is determined by the owner or manager. The risk then is that a property may be sold as a child-free hotel, only to have the owner opening the pool up to families at the weekend.

Then again, a hotel that really is child-free runs the risk of being a honeymoon enclave – this is particularly true of some all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. Also, hotels that don’t accept bookings from guests under 18 years, tend to be four- or five-star and therefore expensive. Get More details from: Telegraph.co.uk