Skycot or Virgin seat plus with three month old?

[MrsWombat]

We are flying to Florida next year with an as yet unborn 3 month old, and are about to book the flights with virgin.

I saw on their website about sky cots and they sound good in theory, but after reading up on them, I'm worried that we won't get one, or our party will get split up, or there'll be turbulence for most of the trip and baby will end up on lap anyway. It's also very important for our eldest that we have a window seat and the skycots are in the middle.

Are the skycots worth the hassle and uncertainty? I'm thinking seat plus might be a good way of giving us extra room and we can have a window seat for DS, and we'll pretty much know where we are sitting. It's a 747 with 3-4-3 config, so we'd book a row of three by the window plus the seat across the aisle. So we'd sit together for take off and landing when DS is often sick, and DH (who will need a nap after driving/working late the previous night) can move over giving us extra space. (He'll get poked awake and handed the baby if needed)

Am I mad for considering this? We flew an airline without skycots last year, and people seemed to cope with babies/toddlers on their laps.

Do you mean buy a seat for baby?
We did this for 18 mth DS1. It worked pretty well.
We also did get offered a bulkhead seat (which is where the sky cots go), and he ended up sleeping in blankets on the floor.

We also bought DS2 a seat at 22 months. He spent most of the flight sleeping on me in a sling.

Given DS's requirement for a window, I'd take a soft sling, and go with the configuration you've mentioned above.

I don't think you can guarantee the extra seat? It's just on flights that aren't full. So you wouldn't be able to rely upon it.

With BA and KLM, you can guarantee a spare seat by paying for it, PrincessofChina, so we actually paid 3 full seats, and a 80% price to guarantee a seat for the toddler.
We'd paid for it, and it was ours, complete with boarding card etc. It was classed as one of the occupied seats on the plane.
Expensive, but we didn't fancy a toddler on our knee for 14 hrs.

Having just googled, the seat plus looks slightly different.

What will you do with the baby on the seat though? He'll roll off!

Virgin seat plus says you can't have a child's safety seat on it.

We would hold the infant on our laps and juggle him between us for the flight. We've done this before with our eldest on planes with no skycot.

The extra seat would just give us extra space. We could lie him on the seat to have a supervised nap, or if hands are needed for something else, but it more for space and sanity.

With seat plus, you can buy an extra seat in the row next to you for about £60 each way. You are guaranteed this seat unless it is required for a medical emergency, or there is a plane change etc. They only release a certain number of seats for this, which is why I am worrying about this now!

Thanks for talking about a sling addictedtosugar, we have a wrap that I was planning to use to free up my hands as much as possible, and as a spare blanket etc. Glad to know it's a good idea.