Best Travel Booster Seat – BubbleBum Inflatable Booster Seat Review

The Easily Portable Bubblebum Booster Seat Made Our Family Travel So Much Easier

The Bubblebum inflatable car booster seat inflates in seconds to make a safe yet easily portable car booster for all your travels or even for use at home.

Traveling with kids always involves carrying more stuff than you think. I was ecstatic when the kids moved out of car seats and diapers and I finally got to leave the Pack ‘n Play at home. But, alas, they still needed a booster seat…

This isn’t as much of a problem if you are flying somewhere and hopping straight into a rental car for the duration of your trip.

But if you are only planning on using the booster for 1 or 2 days out of a 10 day trip, the giant plastic booster seats become a pain to lug around or store in your hotel room, carry into an airport, etc.

Enter the Bubblebum Booster Seat. Invented by a Mom in Ireland who also disliked lugging large booster seats on trips, the magic of these seats is that they are inflatable.

6 Reasons To Like The Bubblebum Travel Booster Seat

1. It is easily packable

When you don’t need the Bubblebum, it compresses down to about the size of a large, hardback book and weighs only a pound. It even comes with its own soft carrying bag.

The Bubblebum fits easily into a suitcase or even a small backpack, perfect for touring cities like Washington, DC or Paris, when you might only need it for the Uber ride from the airport to the hotel.

P.S. The Kavu Rope Bag (see my review) is another travel favorite and the Bubblebum fits nicely inside it.

Put it in your carry-on and then if your luggage doesn’t arrive, you still have a way to get the kids safely to your first destination.

It inflates quickly with just about 5 puffs and deflates just as quickly with a little pressure. I like to fold it in half, put my knee on it, and presto, deflated in seconds.  

2. The Bubblebum booster seat is very safe

If an inflatable booster seat sounds too flimsy to be safe, then be rest assured that the Bubblebum has met all the safety requirements of the US and the EU.

It has been crash tested and is recommended by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

There are attachments for the lap belt to keep it in place, and it even has an attachment that attaches to the shoulder strap of the seat belt to keep the strap in place over the shoulder. 

• Note- The shoulder strap thing is a little annoying to get the hang of but once you get the trick, it is pretty easy. And frankly, the kids mastered it faster than I did.

4. You can fit 3 Bubblebum booster seats in the back seat of a regular sedan

The other benefit of the Bubblebum is that because of its small size, you can easily fit 3 of them across the backseat of a sedan. This is something I can’t do with hard plastic booster seats because they have arms so only two will fit in my car’s backseat.

As an adult, I also find it far more comfortable to sit next to a Bubblebum for long periods (say on summer road trips) than a regular car booster seat. 

5. The Bubblebum booster seat is a great gift for relatives who only occasionally transport kids

The Bubblebum also makes a great gift for the grandparents or other family members that only occasionally drive children around. It is a lot easier to keep one of these in the trunk than a hard plastic booster seat.

My Mom only transports the grandkids occasionally so she prefers the Bubblebums because she can store them in her trunk when not using (and it doesn’t take up her whole trunk).

It is the best of both worlds– she has her backseat available like normal when not transporting kids but can pop the booster seats in super fast when she does need them.

She likes being able to carry the Bubblebums in the car and not worry about forgetting them at home or in case we need her on the fly for a forgotten basketball/football/ piano/ dance/ play rehearsal/ violin/ etc, etc, etc. that we seem to spend all our days shuttling back and forth to.

And she likes being able to put 3 grandkids in the backseat together in booster seats, so she could pick up a group for “Grandma Camps.”

6. The Bubblebum booster seat comes in a variety of colors so the kids can pick their own

Because who wants the same color car seat as their sister??? (Unless of course, having them all be the same color cuts out the arguing, in which case, go for that option obviously. )

The Drawbacks to the Bubblebum Booster Seat

The downsides to the Bubblebum is that it takes a minute to get familiar with the lap belt and shoulder strap attachments. But like all technology, the kids mastered it faster than me and could belt themselves in in no time.

It also doesn’t have arms. One kid preferred his hard plastic booster seat at home because he liked the arms but would use the Bubblebum on trips, while another preferred the Bubblebum at all times.