From diaper delivery to car-seat rentals, a host of services promise to remove some of the hassles for parents traveling with newborns. We put them to the test

By RON LIEBER
April 1, 2006; Page P6

Imagine your least favorite parts of traveling: long check-in lines, heavy bags, hotels with tiny rooms. Now imagine enduring them while toting a mewling infant -- and the nine tons of extra travel paraphernalia that babies require.

It's enough to squelch any sense of wanderlust. But a host of services have popped up in the last few years to try to convince parents that traveling with infants can be less stressful. They promise to minimize many of the obvious headaches for parents, from having to schlep around huge bags of diapers to finding a rental car with a baby seat.

Babies Travel Lite, a two-year-old company based in Los Angeles, now ships about 500 orders of baby food, diapers and sunscreen to hotels and rental villas around the world each month. Baby's Away, a national network of local services that rents high chairs, toys, bouncy seats and other equipment, has doubled the number of locations it serves to 60 since 2000. New this year: outlets that cover Santa Barbara, Calif., and the north Jersey Shore.

Some other, more well-known companies are also getting into the action. Hertz has overhauled its car-seat loaner program, "Buckle Up Baby," retraining staff in inspecting, installing and cleaning the seats. The Westin hotel chain, meanwhile, has a Heavenly Crib to match its much-imitated Heavenly Bed.

Until this winter, I always eyed baby-toting travelers with pity. So when it came time for my wife and me to take our 11-week old daughter to meet her great-grandmother in Florida, I wondered if these services could actually produce a hassle-free trip. We would leave home with only a baby carrier and diaper bag -- and try to spend, rent and outsource our way to a smooth journey.

We ordered boxes of diapers and other supplies from three different services, and all of them arrived at our hotel before us and were quickly delivered to our room without a hitch. Our crib, stroller, beach umbrella, bouncy seat and humidifier -- ordered from the local Baby's Away outlet -- also arrived promptly.

That's the good news.

It was some of the biggest companies in the travel industry -- those that have the most experience dealing with traveling families and theoretically should be the most advanced -- that had trouble keeping up. In December, the Westin chain announced with great fanfare that it was going smoke-free as of the beginning of this year, which was one of the main reasons we chose the hotel. But during our visit, the Westin Diplomat in Hollywood, Fla., resembled a Philip Morris convention. Doormen held open the doors for cigar smokers and welcomed them inside. And smokers were everywhere around the pool area. When we asked a pool attendant about the rules, he said the smoke-free policy only applied indoors and offered to bring us an ashtray. According to a Westin spokeswoman, the hotels are only "strongly encouraged" to make the pool area smoke free.

We also weren't anticipating any trouble with Hertz. It's been two years since Hertz and the American Automobile Association teamed up to overhaul "Buckle Up Baby," but the person who answered Hertz's 800 number couldn't tell us whether the seats snapped out of the car for carrying. And an employee we called at the Fort Lauderdale airport told us that they didn't work that way; she was wrong. Upon arrival, we found our car in the Hertz lot and discovered that the Graco seat did indeed snap out for carrying. A Hertz spokeswoman says that all its infant seats are detachable and that the employees we consulted on the phone should have known that.

Our airline, American, couldn't do much that was special for us. Like many domestic carriers, it doesn't offer bassinets on U.S. flights, and American wouldn't let us reserve the bulkhead seats in advance -- those get saved for travelers with special medical needs and are released to others within a day of travel. (Some foreign carriers offer bassinets.) The airline did let us board first on the flight down, though; not every airline does that these days.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were able to check in several hours early, thanks to the efforts of a sharp-eyed Westin employee who had spotted our posting on flyertalk.com seeking general advice for improving the odds for early check-in at busy hotels. (He didn't know our Wall Street Journal affiliation, and neither did any of the vendors until after our trip was over.) This was crucial, since early morning is the best time of day to fly to avoid delays, but many hotels' official check-in times are in the early afternoon.

To see which was the cheapest option for shipping supplies, we ordered the same items from JetSetBabies and Babies Travel Lite as well as drugstore.com. Turned out, the online drugstore's prices weren't consistently lower, and it didn't provide the same hand-holding as the other two. That said, JetSetBabies requests that customers place their orders at least 10 days prior to their arrival (though it says it can handle orders closer to the travel date); Babies Travel Lite charges a "convenience fee" ranging from $5 to $50 on top of its shipping charge for every order (though if you use the coupon code posted on the site and order far enough in advance you can avoid it).

The Westin we stayed at was well aware of our stored gear (the hotel charged us $36.40 to hold on to it for us until our arrival). JetSetBabies and Babies Travel Lite both called the hotel to confirm the arrival of our box, and JetSetBabies even emailed us with the name of the hotel employee it spoke to. (Babies Travel Lite says that since we took our trip, it has added the email feature.)

Our total cost for renting the equipment from Baby's Away was $193.98 including taxes, delivery fee and a $2 fuel surcharge. One downer: We had to rent the equipment for a full week even though we only needed it for three days plus a few extra hours. Baby's Away owner John Wierzba says that any of the local services are free to enforce the week-minimum rule, though most don't.

On our day of departure, the Baby's Away deliveryman timed his pickup to just before we left the hotel, so we could have the stroller as long as possible. He even came back to give us a pacifier we'd left inside. Baby's Away also refunded the fee for our malfunctioning humidifier, no questions asked.

One final note about our experience: Always inquire about hotel checkout times before you book your flight home. If a hotel locks you out at noon and your flight isn't until 10 p.m., you may be stuck hanging out by the pool with no place to go to put your kid down for a nap.