Originally Posted by
kktalker
My husband, myself, and our six kids (ages infant to 11) will be flying business class from U.S. west coast (LAX, SEA, or SFO) to Tokyo courtesy of husband's company. Three of our kids are pretty responsible, but we have a 7yo with special needs, a 4yo, and the infant who will all need our attention. What airline seating would fit best (for example, suites on Delta vs. herringbone pattern on American), and how would you assign seating for best supervision?
Please no snarky comments about our kids flying. It is a necessary flight, and both my husband and I work our tails off to keep our kids well-behaved and under control.
Don't buy into the scare stories. I've had 2 adults travel with 6 kids between 2-11 years on my long-haul flights too. It works out fine on the carriers of most likely relevance.
Is it safe to assume that the youngest three children are the 7-years-old, the 4-years-old and the infant? I have to assume the 11-year old child is old enough to help you somewhat at least with the 4 year old. Then this can work out fine easily enough, at least assuming you get 8 business class seats.
Non-stop, is my suggestion. Anything else is a greater hassle IME of irregular operations.
ANA has a nice 8 person business class mini-cabin that goes from LAX to HND, it's 1-2-1 in terms of seats in a row. The struggle with that flight it is that it leaves around midnight; but at least then young kids sleep for much of the flight and can adjust time zones usually pretty quickly on arrival IME. They also have the same kind of cabins for LAX-NRT with daytime morning departures, but they get into Japan mid-afternoon and that most often means more time for kids to adjust to the new time zone. In other words, it's sort of a case of pick the lesser evil but still pick your poison.
As someone who has done lots of long-haul travel with young kids and as someone who flew a lot on long-haul flights as as a young kid, I will say that when it comes to children in business class or otherwise you are generally going to be better off service-wise on non-US carriers than on US carriers.