I tried Instagram's top travel kids' hacks — here are the best (and worst)

Times

25-07-2025

Like many parents, every year I torture myself by taking my children on a plane with me — often more than once. The promise of a fruity cocktail in a tropical climate always seems to erase the memory of how terrible the last travel attempt was and, despite previous evidence, I book another one.
The flights with my children, aged two and three, are all on a spectrum between tragic and traumatic, and I'm pretty sure that I'll need to work out a few particularly harrowing ones in therapy. And so, with Instagram endlessly screaming 'kids' travel hacks' at me, I thought I'd try a few out and see if any of them made the experience less like being tormented for enemy secrets.
Parents love a good hack, almost as much as the internet loves to tout one, but often they're just silly, strange or a downright terrible idea — like the person who suggested bringing a tiny sandpit on a flight.
Another mother stuck her children's shoes on the seat tray with double sided sticky tape and smugly described how 'now [she'd] never lose [her] kid's shoes', which, while it's no doubt a problem for some, doesn't quite seem to justify damaging airline property. And so, on a recent trip to Hungary, I narrowed down the hacks to the ones that seemed the most reasonable and the least likely to incite violence (see tiny sandpit).
First up, 'busy bags'. Busy bags, essentially, are hanging toiletry bags with clear compartments filled with random detritus and given a jazzy name. I watched videos for ideas about what I should fill them with, ranging from magnetic blocks and gel stickers (to put on the window) to various other trinkets. I ended up settling on magnetic blocks, crayons, a puzzle and an array of random figurines that I knew my children find fascinating. The verdict? While the busy bag did provide a level of distraction, mainly it just provided my children with a million more things to scatter across the plane.
Next, 'snack boxes', which are, for all intents and purposes, plastic bric-a-brac boxes with various beige foods in them. While I'm sure there were ones on Instagram filled with carrots and tofu, I didn't want my children to kill anyone on the plane so I filled mine with your standard five-a-day: popcorn, Pom-Bears, Smarties, Fruit Pastilles and Cheez-Its.
Essentially, the snack boxes worked. My children were fascinated by them in a way that they wouldn't be by just a bag of crisps. But children are clever, feral little snack monsters, and the second my eldest knew about the existence of The Snack Box, she asked to see it. While I'd planned some kind of grand reveal while on the flight like a bride on her wedding day, she'd already started working her way through it before we were on the train to the airport.
She was, however, surprisingly restrained, and it took her about four hours to fully make her way through it, providing a lengthy distraction. Where this hack loses points is that if a child knocks over the box, as my son did, everything just goes everywhere like a popcorn Catherine wheel.
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I tried other, simpler hacks too. I was advised to bring lollipops to help with ear-popping, use mess-free colouring books and pack coloured masking tape. Unfortunately my daughter had bitten through her lollipop before the flight even taxied, rendering the experiment void. The mess-free colouring books were a hit though — the pens only work on the book so no risk of accidental graffiti — and kept her entertained throughout the flight.
The masking tape, granted, sounded a bit mad but I was sold on the idea by a mother who seemingly moonlights as the PR person for masking tape. Apparently, it has a never-ending number of uses: Keeping children entertained! Child-proofing table corners! Labelling things! Strangely enough, this one was helpful and my children were captivated by it for quite some time, unravelling it and sticking pieces everywhere, then peeling them off — and repeating 20 times.
Other ideas that worked were bringing new toys on the flight (fascinating to tiny people), starving your children of screen time before flights to render iPads more alluring and always gate-checking your pram (a godsend).
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So, what's the verdict? While my children still screamed so aggressively on the flight that one passenger swore at us, a few of these hacks, while not miracle cures, did make the experience slightly less awful.
While the busy bags are probably just going to become a toiletry bag on the next trip, I'll continue to bring mess-free colouring books and a selection of new toys. I'll also keep trying the snack boxes, as they extended the eating time tenfold and created a distraction via snack-choice paralysis. I'll never not gatecheck a pram.
And, if you're ever in need of colourful masking tape, I'll probably have some spare.
Have you any handy hacks for making travel with children easier? Let us know in the comments below