Travel&Vacation

If you follow my columns, you know that Southwest is the only large U.S. airline still offering a unique and attractive deal for seniors. What you may not know is that it’s also among the nation’s friendliest lines for seniors who arrange visits from their minor grandchildren.

What makes an airline “friendly” for minor kids isn’t so much the special fares: It’s the rules and fees. And here, Southwest is generally tops.

On Southwest kids as young as 12 can travel on their own with no itinerary restrictions. AirTran and United also allow kids 12 or over to travel alone. The minimum ages for “adult” travel are 13 on Alaska and 15 on most other domestic airlines.

All airlines I’ve checked operate programs for unaccompanied minors, which includes kids ages five up to the line’s minimum adult age. In those programs, airlines carefully manage the minor through the entire trip and transfer the child to a designated adult at the arrival airport. Southwest’s advantage is that it assesses no extra fee for this service; other lines charge somewhere between $40 and $99 each way.

Even though your grandkids may be past the minimum age, if you think they’re too immature or intimidated to travel alone, Southwest and most other airlines will arrange unaccompanied minor treatment for kids up to 17 or 18 years. (Parenthetically, some lines provide similar unaccompanied service for cognitively impaired adult travelers—but that’s a different story.)

Southwest is one of the few lines to offer youth fares for travelers ages 12 through 21. It notes, however, that some “discount” fares for travelers of any age are often less expensive—although they may be highly restricted. Moreover, Southwest’s youth fares are one-way in case you aren’t sure about return dates.

If your kids have to cancel or modify travel plans, Southwest allows travelers on any sort of ticket to exchange the full value of that ticket toward a future Southwest flight. Other airlines charge some sort of fee, often around $100, to exchange tickets for canceled flights.

Southwest’s only itinerary limitation for unaccompanied minors is that it accepts them only on nonstop or direct (through flight with stops but no change of planes) flights. Most other lines offer more flexible options.

These are the reasons that Southwest is the first choice for many grandparents who want to arrange travel for young grandchildren. Southwest’s advantages are such that lots of seniors drive several hours, on either end or both ends of the trip, to reach airports serviced by Southwest.

Clearly, however, Southwest doesn’t work for all trips. If it doesn’t fly where you want to go, or doesn’t offer accessible nonstop or direct flights, you’ll have to turn to some other line. All the other lines I checked accommodate unaccompanied minors on at least some connecting flights. Although, the fee may be a bit higher than the fee for nonstop flights. Other lines commonly exclude unaccompanied minors on:

• The last connection of the day.
• Overnight red-eye or late-hour flights (except on routes where those are the only flights available).
• Connections requiring an excessive layover at a hub airport.
• Connections that require a change of airport in a hub city, such as Burbank to Los Angeles or Chicago O’Hare to Chicago Midway.

In my experience, Southwest isn’t always the best choice. You’ll find plenty of cases where some other line is a better choice. But it’s often the first place you should look.