Our waterbed, I mean airbed! (Campingaz Double Airbed)

Member Name: katykicker

Product:	Campingaz Double Airbed
Date:	02/06/09 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great price, repair kit provided, easy to inflate & deflate, lightweight.

Disadvantages: Could not get it back in to the original box.

We recently went on a camping trip for three nights and were advised to get ourselves a blow up mattress so that we would be more comfortable and not have to sleep on the cold, hard, sometimes damp floor of a tent. We took up this advice and my Mum purchased this double airbed for my fiance, Tom, as one of his birthday presents. It cost £18.00 from sports-direct.com but is available elsewhere for a similar price.

The airbed comes in a cardboard box and it is very well packed and comes wrapped in polythene complete with a repair kit containing some fabric patches and a tube of glue in a pop-close bag. This is very handy and although we have not needed this yet (thankfully!) we have kept it sellotaped to the underneath of the airbed to avoid it getting lost.

The bed is very easy to put up, simply attach an electric or battery operated pump and the airbed will be fully inflated in just a couple of minutes and ready for use. There is a double lock valve which allows you to pull it out to release the air & pump it in and it allows you to push it back in to seal off the bed and avoid any air from leaking out. Once pumped up we did not need to top up the air for the full four days that we used the bed and were very pleased with the results. The bed was quite bouncy and we pumped it up as full as we could with no problems what so ever. It is very easy to deflate at the end of our stay using a pump again to remove the air and then laying on it to help us fold it back up and pack it in to our suitcase (the cardboard box was discarded the first time we checked the bed out!).

The bed felt almost similar to a waterbed and on a couple of occasions Tom turned over so fast that I ended up turning with him but this certainly gave us a few laughs which was just what we needed on the first night after a 4 hour journey and a delay before we even left our local train station!

It weighs 2.9kg and is 188 x 19 x 137cm and us two adults (I'm not the slimmest either!) had plenty of space and I found that the flocked PVC top meant that it did not matter that we had forgotten to take a sheet as we weren't getting burns from the mattress or finding it scolding hot during the day whenever we visited the tent.

We will definitely be taking this on our next camping trip and were very pleased that Tom had received it as a birthday present as there's nothing better than something for free! I was very pleased with how easy it was to inflate by myself and I did not need to ask for any assistance, also, my Mum took the same bed along camping and similarly was very pleased with it and remarked on what an improvement sleeping on this was when compared to just bedding down on the floor on her previous camping trip.

I would definitely recommend this airbed and there is a slightly better version with a coil structure available from Amazon.co.uk, at present, for £14.94 + free super saver delivery so I would definitely recommend checking this out if you have guests coming to stay or are looking at camping this year to save some pennies. I am rating this airbed 4/5 and have knocked off one star because I would have liked the bed to be deeper.

Summary: A fantastic airbed for guests or camping purposes.