Review of phil&teds Traveler Crib

The phil&teds traveler crib ranks as one of my all time favorite kid travel accessories. Although both our kids have gone through co-sleeping phases, we always like to have a “safe” place to put them available.

Traveling with an infant was easy! We’ve always used the bassinet for our baby jogger, city-select stroller when traveling. We’ve put it in hotel rooms, the floor of an airplane, guest rooms and even on the floor of a tent. (A drawer, placed on the floor, with a small blanket on the bottom will serve the same purpose in a pinch.)

Once the kids get too big for the bassinet we tried a variety of things.  We relied mostly on the pack-n-play for car trips, hotel cribs for far airplane trips and the goodwill of friends and family when we were visiting. It was an imperfect system. We had two small-ish cars: a Toyota Matrix and a Honda Civic. The pack-n-play took up a large portion of our cargo space. Meanwhile, hotels usually can’t guarantee cribs or the crib that arrived was in terrible shape, leaving us in the lurch a few times. On a trip to the Great Smokey Mountains we defaulted to the old “turn two armchairs into a crib” method.

We were prepping for a trip to London, with a then one-year old H, when I read a review of the pea-pod portable bed. I all of a sudden realized there was a whole world of travel beds out there for us to explore. We ended up with the phil&teds travel crib after much research. I borrowed the PeaPod to try from a friend and loved it. When I went to purchase one, it was under a recall and an updated design was not available. (The link above is for the redesigned version.)

The travel crib is lightweight and easy to assemble. We find it a bit difficult to disassemble as the release buttons are the wrong size for adult fingers and require you to press very hard. We have somewhat resolved this issue by keeping an old pen in the crib bag. The pen is the right size to depress these buttons.

The travel crib fits into one of our L.L. Bean rolling duffel bags with enough room for my husband to pack for most trips. We can assemble the whole thing in under 5 min.

It provides plenty of room for sleep but the footprint is compact enough to fit in any hotel room. We took it with us all over England. We never had a problem placing it in any of our B&B rooms. The mattress does lay on the floor, so you have to bend over quite far to load a non standing child in and out of the crib. The side does zip all the way open to provide more options.

We almost always do a few practice sleeps in the house with the travel crib before a long trip. I will set the crib up in the nursery for a night or two before the trip. We find this helps with better sleep on those first few nights of the trip. Before we did this acclamation night our first night of travel was always a mess with the baby.  Acclamation night has largely eliminated this problem.

We’ve been using the crib for two years and I can’t imagine traveling without it. The ultimate test is our upcoming QMII ocean crossing. A small room, combined with all our stuff for the move, plus the four of us. I promise to report back on how the crib performs under these conditions.

Ease of Use

• Easy to Assemble
• Moderately Hard to Disassemble
• Hard to stuff back into bag [/one_third_first]
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Price

• $199.99
• Includes travel bag
• Comparable to other travel cribs