Hiring a car seat- recommendations and tips please!

[Joneseygirl77]

We're off to Portugal in September with our DD who will be 17mo at the time. What should we do about a car seat? We're hiring a villa and collect our hire car at Faro airport. The journey is about 1 hour to the villa.

We have 2 car seats at home but I don't want to take one of those in case it gets damaged. But I've seen lots of mumsnetters advising that hiring car seats can be a minefield.

Any recommendations for car hire companies that provide good safe car seats? Thanks!

Do not hire one.

We have had numerous disasters ranging from broken seats to ones covered in mouse droppings.

I'd take one or buy a cheap one once there.

Hertz, Avis and Europcar are shite.

I would never use a hired car seat, we have been taking various seats on planes ( mostly Faro in fact) for about 9 years and haven't had one damaged yet.
Zitauto are a good, cheap car hire company at Faro though- just don't hire a seat from them!!!!

I wasn't keen on hiring one. It was illogical to me to have (inevitably) a poorer quality seat when going somewhere with a worse road safety record than the UK. We came back yesterday. The seat was fine. We put it in a car seat bag. This also gives handy extra space to pack bulky stuff like nappies around the seat!

Thanks all. Ok guess we might just take our own then. We have an isofix one so guess we'll need to take the base too though. How big are these car seat bags?

We got a Be Safe one and it is huge. Our eat can fix with either belt or base. We use a base at home but used belt on holiday. You will need to make sure your hire car has isofix.

Thanks that's really helpful.

Looks like we'll be taking our own then rather than risking hiring one!

I figured that buying a cheaper one here is still safer than hiring a dubious one with unknown history whilst abroad so we did that and it is useful as a spare too.

The problem is you don't know if it's been damaged in transit or not. The way they chuck stuff around there could easily be a stress fracture to the plastic that you can't see, for example, and you're then using a weakened seat for years to come. The whole car seat business is a mess.

Hmm know what you mean famous as that was my worry so that's why I initially bought hiring one. But given the advice above I'm not sure if I have an alternative. Considering just buying a basic belt one for hols as had a quick toot on JL and it works out £15 more expensive than hiring one.