Child car seats in Spain - hire or bring?

[DippyMummy]

We have a holiday booked in Spain for the summer, and are now trying to find good value car hire. We intend to do a fair bit of driving while we are there.

EasyCar looks good, but even if you book & pay for a child seat as an optional extra they say that they "can't guarantee a child seat"! There's also no info on what size seats they have available, and no options for choosing the right one.

We are starting to wonder if it would be easier (and cheaper?) to bring our own child seat (it's for a 4 yr old) as baggage in the hold on the plane. We'll be flying with BMIBaby. Does anyone have experience of either hiring a child seat with EasyCar, or of taking a seat as baggage?

Any advice welcome! Thanks.

I would bring yours with you. First time we went to Spain with DS as a baby, when we picked up the car, they gestured to a few car seats sitting on the floor of the office and asked us if we needed one.
If we had not brought our son's with us, I would have bought one. The seats were really old and shabby looking - and the covers needed a good wash.

Then again, I think it depends on how fussy you are. Car seats are my 'thing' IYKWIM...I have friends who use old wrecked ones that have been passed around through several generations and it totally freaks me out.

If you do decide to bring your seat in the hold, I would bring a roll of parcel tape and a bin bag with you to wrap it up a bit as they do get tossed around and will get wet when moving between the terminal and the plane.

On car hire BTW, two separate sets of friends who have houses over there and go regularly recommended holiday autos and we have found them competitive in the past.

Thanks dingdong3! Having now spoken to someone at EasyCar, I am fairly convinced that bringing our own car seat is the safer option. Thanks for the tips re parcel tape & bin bag. We will check out Holiday Autos.

We took our own (flew ryanair irrc and they don;t charge you to take them)

We put them in a hugggge zip up plastic laundry bag (couple of quid from the market)

we went with record go and had the same experience as dingdong.

absolute deathtraps.

Ditto others who have said car hire seats are nasty. The Spanish ones fit completely differently to UK (the car hire people won't fit them or even help out IME) and they did not have rear facing ones for ds when he was teeny baby. We had Graco travel system so just pushed ds in car seat part on pushchair right up to door of plane and then they put car seat bit and pushchair in hold, as they would if you just had a pushchair IYSWIM.

My brother went to Spain with Monarch earlier in the year and took 2 forward facing seats free in hold. Much better to have your own.

I echo what others have said, we had a hire one and after finally finding one that didnt have a whole load of grunge on it, I noticed that the webbing had been sewn onto the fabric for some reason. I finally found one that I thought the safest but I was never happy with it. My parents have now bought a new seat to go in their car for us

I have just come back from the US and took my own seat as I didnt want to risk the same thing. I had bough a spare 1-2-3 and took this. The base seperates from the back so you can sort of fold it, I then secured it with a strap to keep it togther while in the hold. On the way back Virgin put it into a bag for me

Meant to post www.toysrus.co.uk/Babies-R-Us/Travel-and-Pushchairs/Car-Seats-and-Boosters/Highback-Booster-Seats/Be line-SP-Luxe-Car-Seat-in-Shadow(0071906)this is the one I bought

these are coming out in the Spring and look ace. They are for age 4-11, and they can use it as a backpack on the flight.

We always take car seats with us. DS1 is quite a big 5yo and so for him we just take the booster bit of the seat, which fits really easily in bag. Maxi Cosi fits in a bin bag and I think we have used baggage allowance for it - but do check.

Thanks so much for all your responses. We are now definitely bringing our own seat!