5, 6 or 7 nights for first holiday with baby?

[Hyperquiet]

What's the perfect length of time to go away for a baby's first holiday in your opinion and why?

Also for a 4 hour flight is arriving back home at 2 in the morning going to be too hard with a baby?

The alternative is to go with SunExpress which would land at a more reasonable time in the evening but read some dodgy reviews!

Thanks!

How old is baby OP?

Baby will be 8 months!

For first holiday keep it short. Long weekend sort of thing. Just so you can guage what works and what doesn't work.

It depends on your babe OP, my girls were a dream at that age. Does your baby sleep well? Can they nap on the go? DDs were locked in their sleep schedules by 8 months, so it was easy to stick to their routine, when we were around the pool, they took naps usually in their pushchair or on us. My first holiday with DD, I realised how much time I was going to spend in the shade feeding them etc. neither of my girls were eating loads of solids at that age, just abit of finger foods, so it’s easy cater for them.

Landing at 2 am doesn’t sound fun for anyone, but depends how good a sleeper your baby is. DD1 didn’t transfer too well. DD2 is didn’t wake until she has had her 12 hours, could sleep absolutely everywhere and fell asleep in seconds. First holiday not to visit family abroad DD was 6.5 months, we went for a week. She slept the whole flight; I fed her on take off and didn’t move all flight! Good luck OP!

We took our first (only) baby boy away last September 2023 to Menorca and he was 8 months old. We booked 8 nights and it was perfect amount, not too long or short and felt ready to come home, felt rested. We deliberately chose Spain, a Spanish island so the flight time would be reasonable for him (and us!) so just under 2.5 hours from London. Hoping to go away again this September, we are trying a bit further afield to another island Crete, Greece, just over 4 hours from London, but he'll be 19 months old by then.

I don't think anyone is going to be able to give you tried and tested advice on the difference between 5, 6 and 7 days. Nothing magical is likely to happen between days 5 and 7. If it involves a flight then maybe it's worth going for a bit longer, to get VFM from the flights and also to allow for some decent quality time once baby has settled down at the resort.

As for the flight times, at 8 months it's a lottery. The question is more whether you want to be finding your way home from the airport at 3:30 am (2am, plus an hour for delays, plus 30 minutes for baggage and passport control). It would have to be a pretty good deal for me to do that without a baby.

Thanks everyone. So the flight would be almost 4 and a half hours long.

And we'd land around quarter past 1 but assuming we wouldn't leave the airport till after 2 am.

@Hyperquiet Why so far? Are you visiting family? If you have a choice, around 2 hours flight is a lot easier and pay for a decent flight!!!! Why make it all so difficult? We took ours in the car to France and also flew to Majorca and Menorca when DC were little. Easy transfers and decent flight times. Start with easy destinations and build up to further.

For a four hour flight I’d stay at week to make it worthwhile

I think sun express is fine (not been on it but a bit of a planes geek)

We're going for an all inclusive concept that suits our dietary requirements so we're going to this particular place.

@Hyperquiet In that case, you will just have to decide what makes sense for you. It’s a very narrow choice? Will
you do this every year?

We might be more open to non resort style hols as baby gets older! Probably depends on what's easiest.

I think we're probably going to go for the later flights as hopefully baby will sleep.