to worry about my children about to travel in a Spanish taxi without car-seats?

[parakeet]

I've never been abroad with them before so I don't know how it normally works. But we'll be arriving at the airport late at night and we'll have to get a taxi. My children are four and two - the taxi is never going to have car-seats is it? What can I do?

I lived in Spain - they have a rather more perfunctory attitude to car safety than in the UK. No taxis will have child car seats and they'd probably think you were even crazy for asking. We used the clip-on Maxi-cosi baby car seat when DD1 was a baby but I think if you are very concerned, get blow-up ones. WOuld blow-up cushions work, for your four year old at least?

Where are you going? If you're going to a major city, eg, Madrid, Barcelona, then the public transport systems are very good and run late into the night.

I should add, when the DDs were older and we were back visiting in SPain, we used to just belt them in and I'd keep my arms around them. Not ideal but it wasn't worth lugging car seats abroad for a 10 min journey. If the driver had been driving dangerously I would have made him stop and got out of the car.

60! for blow up car seat?? £44 for the boostapack!
buy cheap booster seats from eg argos and take them. have seen idea of "Add a set of travel straps to baby's regular car seat and wear it like a backpack."

or put booster seat(s) inside a bag. not fogetting to pay the airline extra for the privilege...

if airport has car hire you might eb able to hire seats only - but will cost you same as buying two spare booster seats for these occasions. (and to keep later at home for when you tansport friends of your dcs)

We hired two car seats for our children (2 and 8 months) when we had a hire car in Lanzarote earlier this year. They were attached by the seat belt but swung around all over the place even when correctly fitted - if you turned a corner sharply, the seats slid into the door. No doubt better than not having anything at all but pretty terrifying.

fucking hell, those blow up seats are expensive!

Thanks January!

Yep, car seats are compulsory in Spain but taxi drivers are not obligated to provide them. Which area are you going to? There are many brit-run kids equipment hire companies around in the major holiday regions, you can hire everything from stairgates to carseats to toys?

I've just moved to the UK from Spain. No car seats in taxis, I'm afraid. Once a taxi driver refused to take us from the airport because we had our 2 yr old with us an no car seat, but other than that one strange experience, no taxi driver has mentioned it. Use the seatbelts or, if you're arriving in Madrid, the metro runs till about 130am.