Before our first journey overseas with a baby, travelling with children wasn’t so much of a travel. Simply load all our possessions into the back of a very large Volvo, fill up for petrol, leave, stop for food, fill up for more petrol and then arrive.

But going on a plane would present entirely new challenges: limited baggage allowances, keeping a child in one space for a long period of time and feeding in a confined space.

This is the place to share tips with those facing the same dilemmas.

I learnt the following:

Spend as much as you can on the plane ticket: low cost where they charge you for every gram of luggage is out, normal airlines let you take your buggy to the gate (as long as it’s reasonably sized), give the little one some luggage allowance and are more accommodating of families travelling.

If you can, splash out on an upgrade which gives you those extra 10kg that might cost you a fortune anyway.

Equally, if there are two adults and a baby travelling, consider buying the little one a seat of his or her own – that way you will get three seats in a row, which makes meal times and sleep times a lot easier.

As you can see, I have a policy of trying to spend my way out of difficult situations – but if you’ve got more cost effective ways to make life easier, we’d love to hear them.

Our latest experience was a four-star hotel in Seville. The first thing I got wrong was the location of our hotel. We read lots of guide books and web sites as always and noticed that when they talked about hotels, they were indicating how close each one is to the Giralda, the famous cathedral and focal point of Seville. We were pleased to see that the hotels we liked the look of would be close to the cathedral, the Alcazar and so many other famous Seville landmarks. What I forgot, of course, was that with cathedral comes BELL TOWER! And with bell tower comes, well, bell ringing! And not just ordinary bell ringing, oh no. This is serious bell ringing. Every quarter of an hour, one loud chime for the quarter-hour, two for the half-hour, three for … you get the gist. So, on the hour, four chimes – PLUS additional chimes to record the time for you, in case you happened to be asleep (no chance with those rock-hard beds keeping you awake). So at five in the morning, you get 4 chimes for the hour plus 5 more to tell you it’s 5am. This is so lovely! And yes, you had tried earlier to put the air-conditioning on to drown out the sound. And you freeze because the air-con thermostat doesn’t seem to adjust the temperature – it’s arctic, icy, ice-berg or ossified. This is holiday? Thankfully, Seville is beautiful but you need to think about hotel location if you are in any way sensitive to noise….