Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Any experience renting car seats with your rental car?

My daughters will be 1 and 2 years old when we travel from Tampa to Harrisburg this fall to visit the inlaws. I am not sure if we should lug their car seats to the airport (ugh!) or just rent them ($130 extra).

Our friends have twins and rent them. Their feeling is that as long as they are using a reputable car rental agency, it would know if the car was in an accident and would replace the car seats, and that they would rather do that than have their car seats jostled around through aircraft luggage. There was some discussion in the dumb questions about pregnancy and babies thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9654&p=255417&hilit=car+%2Aseat#p255417

I am interested to see this thread though!

Mine is still in the infant bucket seat, but I take it with me. We have to because we take a cab to the airport and we need it for that. They will gate check it if you fear damage from regular baggage check.

With twins I don't know how you would juggle all that, though. Renting might be easier.

I'm flying to San Francisco in a few weeks and have to get to a wedding in a state park that can only be reached by car. We only have a big convertible car seat and we're not going to take that on the plane, so we have to rent a car and car seat in SF. When I made the reservation I was told that they would "write a note" that said we needed a car seat, but that they don't actually guarantee that you'll get one...? I explained that the whole reason I'm traveling across the country is to get to this wedding and we can't do that without the car seat, and the woman was like, oh, don't worry, it's "very unlikely" that they won't have one. I'm so annoyed. I'll let you know how it goes!

mooo - I don't know if this is an option for you, but we bought a cheaper car seat just for air travel. It's a Cosco Scenera that I want to say was like $45 at Wal-Mart (hate Wal-Mart, but they had what we needed). It is super light, rear or forward facing, and really easy to lug throughout airport.

I didn't see your suggestion, but thanks sofrito! We rented a car seat and it was no problem at all. They had it there waiting for us, we installed it fairly easily, it was clean, and it cost like $8.