9 Things to Know Before Letting Your Child Fly as an Unaccompanied Minor

10.01.2024 - 22:51 / cntraveler.com / Spirit Airlines

Over the holidays, Keri Wilmot’s 14-year-old son was flying home alone from his Massachusetts boarding school to Texas when mechanical issues caused a delay that dragged on long enough that the flight crew timed out. Falling squarely at the height of one of the busiest travel periods of the year, flights were of course oversold, meaning his best option was to wait through the 12-hour delay. Since American Airlines’ rules for unaccompanied minors required a guardian (in his case, a school chaperone) to get a gate pass and stay with him at the gate until the flight took off, he was never left alone—and his dad picked him up safely in Dallas at 1:30 a.m.

“It's an exhausting day when you are thousands of miles away from your child,” says Wilmot, a pediatric occupational therapist and toy expert. “It's hard when things don't go smoothly, but he did arrive home safely, just a lot later than we expected.”

Headlines over the last few weeks have been dominated by nerve-wracking tales of children’s solo travels gone wrong though. There was a six-year-old traveling on Spirit Airlines, who landed in Orlando instead of Fort Myers (the gate agent who put him on the flight has since been fired). Days later, a 16-year-old on a Frontier flight never had his boarding pass scanned, and he landed in Puerto Rico instead of Ohio.

“Obviously there was an operational misstep or two,” Daniel Friedenzohn, aeronautical science associate dean and professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, says of the recent incidents. Friedenzohn points out that the vast majority of the tens of millions of travelers who traveled over the holidays this year, including kids flying on their own, did get to their destinations without incident.

Even still, the reality of letting your child fly solo can still be daunting—so we mined travel experts and fellow parents for their best advice. These are their top tips for sending unaccompanied minors on flights, from checking bags and using tracking apps to nailing down a pre-flight routine in advance.

Every airline has a detailed rules for children flying alone defined in their contract of carriage. Some carriers offer unaccompanied minor service, typically for children age 5 to 14. The additional fee for the service is $150 on United (for one or two kids), American (for groups of siblings), Delta (for up to four kids), and JetBlue (per child) and Spirit (per child).

Southwest’s service is $100 per person, but only for those 5 to 11 years old, while Alaska Airlines has a tiered program for those 5 to 12 years old ($50 for nonstop flights and $75 for connecting). Hawaiian Air charges between $35 and $100 for unaccompanied minor service for passengers age 5 to 11, whereas Frontier doesn’t allow