Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, there are really very very few products in this category, which means that your choice is going to be either to purchase this or have a completely different way of transporting your kid ( a car seat perhaps). Since I purchased and returned this product my bias is probably towards the latter. The product itself is well described and most reviews have accurately reflected the features, but I want to add a couple of important points. One comment common across many threads here is the lack of a strap between the legs allowing the kid to slide down the seat. I'm not sure if we did something wrong that inadvertently worked or if the others have simply missed this, but there is a strap on the harness through which we threaded the actual seat belt on the flight and held our kid in place. The flight attendant mentioned that she had seen other parents do the same. We also followed the advice of another reviewer on this thread and placed a kitchen-drawer liner underneath our 2-year old and this proved to be a perfect way of holding him in place. We are planning to carry a piece of liner for every flight henceforth, so thanks whoever you are :-) We tested the harness a couple of times in the house and as most reviewers note, it is pretty easy (a minute or two) to slide it over a seat and secure a child, but there is a huge difference between doing it on a dining chair at home and doing it on a flight with a luggage, wriggling kids, impatient passengers etc (I'm mentioning these so parents don't get over confident about the ease of use). Some of the problems we faced included 1. While it is easy to slip the harness over the seat, it is much harder to swing it around and align it in such a way that the straps align with the kid accurately. You need to either keep the strap really loose before you board which means it will keep slipping up and down the seat as you are also struggling with your kid or if you keep it tighter, it is hard to move it around the seat. This is not a negative against the product itself, but simply a note to remind the reader that you have a very short time to get this right amidst all the bedlam. 2. This is the most annoying feature - depending on the seat configuration, to cinch it tightly, you may need to put it under the tray or simply over the tray itself each of which creates its own problems. If it is under the tray, it is a bit hard to get the tray to shut both physically and without causing some annoyance to the passenger (however accommodating they may be). It is even worse over the tray and makes it completely useless for the passenger behind you. This happened on a leg when the seat back was not "deep" enough to allow for slack and we were forced to go over the tray. Needless to say we did not use it even though the passenger was kind enough to allow us to do so 3. After all this, the top strap still ended up around the shoulder/neck of our son forcing him to sit up and we had to put a pillow behind him to prop his neck One point about flight attendant's involvement - We used it on a few Delta flights and I'm not sure if other airlines may have a different policy, but we did print the TSA guidelines and carried them with us. No one prevented us from actually using the restraint, but all the attendants flatly refused to help us physically in any way (even though we did not ask for their help, simply their acknowledgement). I suspect this is probably a liability concern and wasn't such a big deal for us, but if you are a single parent traveling with a kid or kids and expecting some assistance from the flight crew, you may want to note this point.