One Mile at a Time reports that Emirates has published a new restriction on first class travel. Awards and upgrades can no longer be redeemed for first class for children 8 years old or younger.

Effective as of August 15, 2015:

Please note that passengers aged 8 years old and below are ineligible for First Class Emirates Classic Rewards and Upgrade Rewards.

You can still buy children cash tickets to travel first class on Emirates. You just cannot redeem points for it. So if you pay them enough cash, they don’t mind kids. They just don’t want the ‘freeloaders’ to do it. Emirates has a very strange relationship with its frequent flyers, viewing the program not as a source of revenue but as a tool to encourage paid travel on their planes. And even there, the program is especially ungenerous.

The Emirates website, though, still allows first class awards to be booked for passengers who list their date of birth making clear they are 8 years old or younger. It’s unclear what would happen when the passengers attempt to travel (or if this just isn’t being fully enforced yet, and perhaps it will be in the future).

Bear in mind also that Emirates already restricts redeeming first class awards to their own elite members. However both of these rules apparently only apply to using Emirates Skywards points!

• A Qantas frequent flyer member (or Air Canada member, but the rates aren’t genreally as favorable) can still redeem their points for Emirates first class, without status.

• A Qantas frequent flyer member (or Air Canada member) can still redeem their points for a child under age 9 to fly Emirates first class.

• And American Express, Citi, and Capital One points transfer to Qantas, while those banks that are retaining Emirates transfer relationships are doing so at a rate of 5:4 rather than 1:1 making Qantas more favorable still.

Emirates will not allow elite members of the Skywards program to redeem first class awards when traveling with children (unless they want to leave those kids in back as an unaccompanied minor if they are at least five years old), but will allow Qantas members without status to do so. That’s odd.

And given the number of miles and cash surcharges associated with these awards, there’s often as much revenue associated with a first class redemption as with a discount first class revenue ticket.

All that said, many of you don’t like the idea of children in premium cabins feeling they (1) disturb rest, and (2) that’s appropriate for economy, because coach passengers aren’t paying for rest. On Emirates kids don’t belong in first class anymore, it seems, unless you pay enough – but they do belong in business.

I’d suggest that much of how a child acts during the flight has to do with the planning that goes into their travel – how their flying lines up with their normal schedule, what activities are prepared to keep them occupied, how they’re engaged (or not) by their parents. There are outliers, of course, but there are plenty of badly behaving passengers who have reached an age of majority!

And Emirates first class is the perfect place to squirrel away with a child who is a bit fussy. Just make a beeline for one of the two A380 spa suites, and noise isn’t going to disturb the rest of the cabin!

What do you think of this move by Emirates to ban children 8 and under from the first class cabin – unless their ticket is paid for with cash, in which case Emirates says it’s fine?