Where to Sit While They Sleep

What a family hotel sells is its kids' club. What decides the holiday comes after lunch, when someone small is asleep, and again at bedtime, when they are asleep for the night and two adults are wide awake in a hotel they have paid for, in a room they cannot go far from. The answer to that is outside the bedroom door, and the best hotels for children are the ones where something worth sitting beside is out there.

Corfu

We took a six-month-old to Ikos Dassia in May, in a Deluxe Junior Suite Bungalow, which comes with a small private pool and a patch of garden outside the door. With a baby, that was somewhere to sit through the nap and after bedtime, on a resort of 425 rooms where carrying a sleeping child to a main pool would have been an expedition. Everything else the resort promises families was there too. The crèche takes babies from six months, so ours qualified, and we never used it. The kids' club from four is included in the rate, and two of the pools and the spa are kept for adults. In May the sea was still too cold to be worth the walk anyway. The pool outside the door was the reason to book that room over a cheaper one.

Ibiza

At Can Vistabella Boutique Resort, in the hills behind Sant Antoni, we were a couple, and the children at the pool were other people's, and well-behaved. All fifteen rooms are buildings of their own on one floor, and some of the bungalows can be seen from the pool. If we went back with ours, one of those is the room we would ask for: whoever is asleep after lunch is a glance away from whoever is on a lounger, and in July there is shade all through the garden for both. There is no kids' club and no babysitting, and a children's menu at the one restaurant.

At Hotel Xereca, outside Ibiza Town, the answer is a door. Two of the Garden Doubles connect, and the rooms are huge, bathrooms included, so a room for the parents and one for the children become a family suite, with a door that can be left open. Again there is no club and no babysitting. Talamanca, the nearest beach, is popular with families for its shallow water, and about three kilometres off.

On the north coast, Six Senses Ibiza is the one to choose when a club is wanted: it takes five- to twelve-year-olds, and the spa next to it is for adults only, which divides the day without anybody having to negotiate.

The Algarve

Casa Mae in Lagos was a trip for two as well, and the hotel has nothing built around children: no club and no children's pool. Its answer is a house. Villa Paiol stands on its own and sleeps six, and the hotel arranges surf lessons for anyone over six. Near Aljezur, inside the natural park on the Atlantic coast, Praia do Canal Nature Retreat makes the same offer as a suite: two bedrooms, a garden and a plunge pool, sleeping up to six, with babysitting for the evening out. The infinity pool looks down a valley to the sea, for whichever parent is not on duty.

At the far western end of the coast, Martinhal Sagres takes the other view and plans for every age, at a charge: a crèche from six months, clubs in age groups from two to seventeen, a teenagers' club among them, and children's tennis and padel academies. The beach is directly below.

Cape Town and the Winelands

Delaire Graff Estate, on the pass above Stellenbosch, has no kids' club either, and offers families two Superior Lodges with an interleading door. Each of its sixteen lodges has a heated pool of its own, so the arrangement that saw us through Corfu comes as standard, with a wine estate and some 400 works of art attached. In the city, Mount Nelson is the grand hotel that has thought about children: a club for four- to twelve-year-olds, free at weekends, a heated family pool, connecting rooms and an afternoon tea menu of their own.

Even the best club closes. Mount Nelson's shuts at five and Ikos's at six, and then it is bedtime, and the only question left is what is outside the door.