carseat & flying - what am I doing wrong?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why are you taking the carseat as carryon? Just use the CARES harness (which you have anyway), and check the carseat as normal luggage. Even better -- ship it via UPS to your destination.

OP here - genuinely asking how comfortable are people checking car seats? Having watched all sorts of luggage being thrown around, I'm kind of uncomfortable with how damaged the seat could be. Asking this because maybe I just need some perspective, but why am I buying a good car seat just to have it damaged and thrown around? That's why I've been gate checking it.

Even if gate checked, it's going to get tossed aroujnd as you retrieve it (unless you're flying a small plane) at the baggage claim on arrival so it goes through the "system" anyway.

How was your car seat boxed to begin with? Ours just came in a cardboard box with little packing material, and I'm sure it got tossed arond by the delivery people on the way.

OP again (not much going on tonight LOL) we gate check as we're getting on the plane on the jetway then it's there right on the jetway when we get off. I guess I figure it's less handling than the usual checking at the ticket counter.

Thanks to the PP for the gogobabyz cart. That would at least cut down on repacking the carseat into the duffel, even if I have to ignore the terrible product spelling

My mother worked in an airport. It gets toss around at gate check.

[Anonymous]

OP. How old is your child and what seat?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:


OP again (not much going on tonight LOL) we gate check as we're getting on the plane on the jetway then it's there right on the jetway when we get off. I guess I figure it's less handling than the usual checking at the ticket counter.

That's not always (or usually) the case, though. Twice I gate-checked the car seat, only to have it appear on the regular luggage carousel at the destination, along with all of the luggage that was gate-checked.

We traveled for years with our Britax Boulevard car seat, and it was never damaged through the regular checked-luggage process. The one time we've had a problem was in the past year, when the airline misplaced our high-backed booster seat after check-in, and it didn't make our flight. They gave us a loaner, and delivered our seat to us later.

[Anonymous]

We traveled with a seat similar in width to the Scenera and slightly taller and it went through the x-ray machine just fine everywhere we traveled.