Follow-Up: Booking before Babies

After all the dust has settled I guess it's time to put up a quick follow-up to how the whole booking before babies work around went.  All in all booking an extra-seat for an unborn infant was a great idea and it more or less went smoothly at the airport and in the air.  

If you'll be travelling close to your due date, or if you're like us and used miles and need to take advantage of availability while you can, booking an extra seat for an unborn infant may be the only way to actually get a seat.  There were a couple drawbacks to booking the extra seat though. It cost a little more, we had to pay the co-pay on the extra seat, as well as the lap-infant fare, which amounted to about $100.  The other and more annoying drawback was that we officially had two lap infants.  While in actuality we only had one, they were both booked as lap infants, and the airlines system could only see us as passengers with lap infants, the empty "extra seat" apparently counted as if someone was there .  Due to the amount of oxygen masks in each row airlines limit the number of lap infants that can be in any given row at a time.  So if the plane is 3/4/3, like the 747 we flew to Frankfurt the system would not allow us to be put into a row together next to a window, because as far as it was concerned we were 3 people and two lap infants and there are only 4 oxygen masks.  Luckily for us the flight to FRA was a 2/3rds full and the gate agent just blocked out a whole middle row in front of the bulkhead for us.  On the way back was another story, our connecting flight in Chicago was nearly full, and we barely had any connection time.  Due to the whole two lap infant thing they were unable to get us seats next to each other.  Luckily other passengers on the plane were fairly understanding to our plight and agreed to swap seats to allow us to all fit together, it probably helped that they didn't mind getting away from the possibility of 4 hours of screaming.  

If you are set on not travelling with a lap infant(or two) and you must book your tickets before they're born then booking "extra seats" is a no brainer and well worth a little bit of a headache and a few extra bucks.