Portable strollers, cribs, and car seats are fiercely debated among parents who love to travel. One indisputable element of flying with kids: They need airline loyalty programs to start playing the points-and-miles game.
With the tips and tricks below, you’ll be well on your way to giving your little ones the best possible gift: elite status.
What do I need to sign up my child for airline loyalty programs?
A name, a birth date, and an address. Many airlines also require that your baby have their own email address—as does Global Entry—so it's wise to get going on that now. You don’t technically need a passport number or a Known Traveler Number, although you can input them into your child’s account if you have them.
How early can I sign them up?
Technically speaking: the minute they’re born. Realistically speaking: sometime before you purchase them their own seat. And that benchmark can come as late as 2 years old.
Although airlines generally allow newborns when they’re a few days old, parents usually start with infant-in-arms (also called infant-in-lap) tickets, which are free on domestic flights and usually about 10 percent the cost of an adult ticket on international flights. But babies can’t earn miles on infant-in-arms tickets—no exceptions.
There comes a point when every adult has to decide when to throw in the towel on infant-in-lap tickets and buy their child a separate seat. Some do that (with the help of a car seat) from the get-go. Others wait as long as possible; say, until their children turn 2, at which point the FAA requires it. Knowing we’d never be able to wrestle an active young toddler for the entire duration of a transatlantic flight home from London, we caved just after our son hit 14 months.
With some exceptions—like Southwest, Emirates, and Air France, which offer discounted child fares—separate seats for infants cost exactly what they would if an adult were sitting in them. The small, and not to be overlooked, upside of having to shell out for the extra ticket? Babies can finally start earning miles.
How do I know which airline loyalty programs to sign up for?
As with your own loyalty accounts, focus on signing your child up for the airlines you fly most often. Unless you’re just looking for new things to brag about on Instagram, there’s no need to sign up for glamorous-sounding loyalty programs you’ll never use.
We first ticked off Delta, our ride-or-die. Virgin Atlantic and Norwegian were second; my brother lives in London, and we fly that route often. Then I tackled the one-offs; knowing that we’d be flying United to Belize, for instance, I made sure my son’s MileagePlus account was ready to go.
What do you have to do to get your baby a frequent flier account?
Most airlines make it pretty straightforward: Parents enroll their kids online just as they’d enroll themselves. Delta’s, however, is bizarrely hard. You’ll need to fill out a form, turn it into a PDF, email it to a specific address, and wait for confirmation of your child’s new SkyMiles account.
How do babies earn miles?
Once they have their own seat, infants earn miles exactly the way adults do: by flying. If you're setting up your child with a loyalty program after a trip, you usually have a year to retroactively credit the flight to the account (Delta allows nine months).
Can you transfer miles from a baby's account to a parent’s?
Yes, but you usually have to pay.
Delta, for example, charges one cent per transferred mile and $30 per transaction; it would cost $230 to transfer 20,000 miles from my son’s account to my own. Whether or not that’s reasonable depends chiefly on which award ticket you’re eyeing. If you’re 20,000 SkyMiles short, does $230 feel like a reasonable sum to pay? Delta caps transfers at 30,000 miles per transaction and allows 150,000 miles to be transferred from any one account annually.
United charges $7.50 per 500 miles transferred, plus a $30 processing fee per transaction; in the same scenario above, I’d spend $330 to transfer 20,000 MileagePlus miles.
Through its terrific Points Pooling program, JetBlue is one of the only domestic airlines that allows families to share points for free. Several international carriers have similarly flexible policies, including British Airways’ Household Account and Emirates’ My Family.
How do you redeem miles for an award ticket?
By calling the airline. There are a lot more hoops to jump through when redeeming miles for minors, especially when they're under 18.
Will my baby's miles ever expire?
It depends on the airline.
Delta, Southwest, United, and JetBlue miles never expire. Others have variations on a theme: Alaska miles don’t expire so long as you’ve earned or redeemed at least one mile in a 24-month period. British Airways Avios expire after 36 months of inactivity. The website MagsForPoints, which lets you exchange relatively small sums of miles for magazine subscriptions, is an easy, last-ditch way to keep a child’s account active if you don’t intend to fly before the miles expire.
But if you’re traveling at least once every couple of years on the airline, you should be good. And it will pay to keep those points up to date. Let’s say my son earns 25,000 SkyMiles a year for the next 18 years—he’ll have banked 450,000 miles by the time he goes to college. As with anything related to points and miles, a little loyalty goes a long way.
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Airline Loyalty Programs For Kids: Why You Need Them and How to Sign Up - Condé Nast Traveler
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