Can I enter the children's ages when my customers book a hotel so the price comes out right for a family?

Yes, as long as your hotel search is set up to collect children as well as adults, your customers can enter the age of each child and the prices that come back should be family prices rather than straight adult ones. The search box can ask how many rooms, how many adults and how many children, and then show an age box for each child so nothing is guessed.

The ages matter because every hotel sets its own rules about who counts as a child, who sleeps free in an existing bed and who needs an extra bed. When the ages are passed through, the supplier applies those rules and sends back the correct room and rate. Some suppliers insist on an age for every child and will simply not return any rooms if the age is missing, which is one of the common reasons a family search comes back empty while an adults only search for the same hotel works fine.

There are limits worth knowing. The cut off age for a child is decided by each hotel, so the same child can stay free in one property and be charged in the next one along the same street. Some suppliers treat older children as adults for pricing. A cot or an extra bed is usually sent as a request rather than a guaranteed item, and some charges for children are collected at the hotel instead of being included in what your customer pays you. Each room also has a maximum number of guests, so very large families may need to be split across rooms.

It is worth running a test family search for a few destinations you sell often, checking that the age boxes appear and that the rate conditions on the room you pick mention the child policy, and asking us to look at your search settings if those fields are not showing.