What I Ask Before I Book

WHAT I ASK BEFORE I BOOK

Four places I ask questions before I hand over a card.

None of this is complicated. It's just knowing the exact word to use, because the wrong word gets you the wrong answer.

FLIGHTS

The ask: "I need preboarding added to my son's ticket."

Preboarding. Not family boarding. They are two different things and the airline will give you family boarding if you let them, which is boarding with everyone else's kids, in the noise, in the line.

Preboarding is before that. Empty plane. Time to get in the seat, get the headphones on, and be settled before two hundred people walk past you.

Ask for it on the ticket, in advance. Most of the time they'll still make you tell the gate agent. That's fine. Just do it the second they open the gate, not when they're already calling boarding.

HOTELS

A microwave and a fridge. This one is the whole thing for us. He has a short list of foods he eats and we travel with an enormous amount of it, so if there's nowhere to keep it and

nowhere to heat it, I can't feed my son. I ask before anything else.

Beds. Enough of them that my son and daughter each have their own space. If there aren't enough, I ask how many extra pillows they can bring, because I am building a barrier down the middle of that bed and I would rather know before I'm standing in the room at 11pm.

A bathtub. When he was younger a shower was not happening. If your kid is there right now, ask. Half the rooms in a nice hotel are shower only and nobody mentions it.

TOURS AND EXCURSIONS

The ask: "How flexible is the timeline and the pace?"

Most of the time I end up booking private instead. Not for the luxury of it. Because a group of twelve people has one pace and it isn't ours.

And I ask about the guide. Specifically whether they have patience for a lot of questions. A lot. My kid will ask, and then ask again, and a guide who is fine with that changes the entire day.

ALL-INCLUSIVE AND LUXURY RESORTS

We stay at a lot of these. Before we book I ask whether they'll purchase my son's safe foods.

I have a PDF of exactly what he eats and I send it. Most places say yes. Some of them have it in the room when we walk in.

You do not have to explain why. You send the list and you ask.

That's it. That's the whole strategy.

Ask before you book, not after you land. And if a place can't answer, that's an answer.