Travelling with baby

[Onemama]

how do you travel with a baby? Do I have to take his car seat with us and a travel buggy? What types are best for this? He will be about 9 months old. Do I just take any old car seat with us and a travel fold up buggy or what?!

We usually just take our normal buggy (our everyday buggy is compact as we live in London and use public transport most days). If we hire a car we'll bring a car seat, but usually no need.

Where are you going?
abroad? Or an hour up the motorway?

Really depends on where you're going and what you're doing.

If you're going to an all inclusive resort then I wouldn't bother with a car seat.

If you're going somewhere with lots of transfers or hiring a car then yes.

Also depends how big your normal buggy is! Most airlines (never been on one where you can't) you can take a buggy all the way to the gate and then they put it in the hold. Sometimes you get it back right off the plane and sometimes you get it at baggage reclaim.

We do have a travel size pram that fits in the overheads but only because we've got 2 kids now so it's pretty essential we have it straight off the plane.

When we had one it didn't matter if we carried him to baggage claim.

As everyone else said it really depends on where you're going and what you're doing.

For us, when we went on holiday in the car or by plane we'd take a cabin size travel buggy, a travel cot, a backpack changing bag and a carry on size suitcase for our son's clothes and cloth nappies.

We never bother with a car seat as we use public transport everywhere.

We went to turkey when ds was 6 months old. We took a travel pushchair. We didnt take a car seat because it was a transfer to an all inclusive hotel. If we hired a car we would have taken a car seat as well but we didn’t. We also took his play mat for him to play on in the room on occasion. The hotel provided a travel cot and high chair etc. I put ds clothes/nappies/playmat etc in my suitcase.

When we travelled to family/friends/uk holiday we take the travel cot, normal pushchair and car seat. The car is pretty much full of ds’ items.

We’ve also never bothered taking the car seat but as others have said, we would do if hiring a car. Even if hire car companies say they provide car seats, I wouldn’t trust one provided by them.
If you’re not bothered about having anything fancy, we use the Joie Nitro as a travel buggy. It’s affordable and easy to fold for going in the luggage hold. DC must be comfortable in it as has always napped well on holidays. Only thing I’d say if you go for that is the hood is quite small so get a sunshade you can clip over it - we got a cheap one from Amazon that does the job.