How are these family hotel guides different from a normal hotel list?

They start with the thing that decides the booking. A ranked list tells you a hotel is good for families and leaves you to work out whether your particular family fits in one room. These guides put the room configuration first: a table showing which properties hold two adults and one child, two and two, two and three, or a couple with a baby, whether any rooms have a door between them, and what a cot costs. Rank comes after that, because a five-star hotel that caps every room at three people is useless to a family of five.

Where do the room facts come from?

The hotel's own website, and nowhere else. Booking sites paraphrase occupancy rules and get them wrong, so a maximum occupancy, a connecting-room claim, a cot charge or an age cut-off only goes on the page if the operator publishes it. Where a chain blocks automated access, a dated archive capture of that same brand page is used and the date is recorded.

Why do some cells in the table show a dash?

Because the hotel does not publish that fact. A dash is not a no, and it is deliberately not filled in with a guess. Most hotels publish far less about occupancy than families assume, and knowing exactly which ones leave you in the dark is worth more than a table with no gaps in it. Where a dash appears, phone or email before you book rather than finding out at the desk.

Do you check whether rooms really connect?

Yes, and the distinction is strict. Hotels use adjoining, adjacent and connecting loosely, and only one of them means a door between two rooms that you can open without going into the corridor. A tick in the connecting column means the hotel says in writing that such a door exists. Everything vaguer than that is treated as unpublished.

How often are the facts rechecked?

Every guide carries its own re-verification date on the page. Family facts go stale in a way that costs money: cot charges change, kids-stay-free ages move, and a hotel that closes its pool for a refit has changed the whole reason you picked it. Publishing the recheck date is a commitment rather than a decoration.

Family Friendly Hotels, City by City

The question that actually decides a family booking is not which hotel is best. It is whether all of you fit in one room, whether there is a door between you and the children, and what the cot costs. These guides answer that first, in a table, before anyone gets ranked.

Emma - Hotels and neighbourhoods

Published August 11, 2026

In Brief

What do these family hotel guides tell you?

Which rooms hold your exact party in one booking, which hotels publish a genuine connecting door, what a cot or rollaway costs, and the age at which children stop staying free. Every fact comes from the hotel's own site, and the gaps are shown as gaps rather than filled with guesses.