Two tips for choosing travel accommodation when you're travelling with a newborn

Visiting a new city or town with your newborn baby can be a bit overwhelming. However, if you pick the right type of travel accommodation, you can make your experience a lot less stressful.

Find a hotel that provides free cribs

One of the reasons people find it difficult to visit a new place with their newborn is because it involves lugging around a huge amount of baby-related paraphernalia.

Things like bottles, baby monitors, a changing mat, sterilising solution, clothes, nappies, a baby sling, wipes and various other bits and bobs can be both very bulky and heavy. This can make the journey to and from your accommodation tiring and stressful.

As such, when deciding where to stay, it's a good idea to look for a hotel that will provide some of the items that you will require to look after your baby so that you do not need to pack and carry quite so many things.

Some hotels, for example, will provide a crib if you request it when booking your room (and in most cases, they will provide it for free).

Not having to include a cumbersome crib in your luggage should help to make the process of getting to and from your accommodation considerably easier.

Choose a hotel room that has a kitchenette and a microwave oven in it

When you're travelling with friends or a partner, you don't necessarily need to stay in a hotel room that has a microwave or a kitchenette, as you can easily pop out to a local restaurant whenever you feel hungry.

However, this is not the case when you are travelling with a newborn baby. The process of getting to a restaurant and eating a meal when you have a crying, hungry newborn in tow, can be both incredibly time-consuming and exhausting.

In this situation, the presence of a functioning microwave and a small kitchenette (with a kettle, a fridge and a sink) in your hotel room can make all the difference to how much you enjoy your time away.

You can, for example, use the fridge to stock up on ready meals, that you and your partner can then heat up in the microwave whenever hunger strikes. This will spare you the stress of taking your newborn and all of their essential belongings with you to a restaurant.

Even more importantly, the microwave will enable you to quickly sterilise your baby's bottles, and thus make feeding times a lot quicker and less stressful.