How Safe Are Hotel Cribs?

According to Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” “there’s no place like home,” but even if you’re not at home, you want to feel safe and comfortable. This is especially true when it comes to the safety and comfort of your infant when staying at a hotel. You expect that the crib provided to you during your hotel stay will keep your child safe from any potential accidents or injuries. Without any knowledge of how the crib has been used in the past or how new it is, how can you be sure that your hotel crib is safe?

New Hotel Crib Safety Standards

On December 28, 2010, official government regulations regarding the safety of child care and hotel cribs went into effect. These regulations ensure that all full-size and non-full-size cribs are safe for your children. The goal of these standards is two-fold: to reduce crib-related hazards and to give parents confidence in the safety of cribs for sale.

The new hotel crib standards:

• Eliminate drop sides
• Improve structural integrity of crib slats
• Increase severity of vertical mattress impact test
• Require a horizontal cyclic test
• Eliminate wood screws from key structural elements
• Reduce toehold exposure
• Require marking and labeling improvements

In the past, there have been retrofit kits used to immobilize the drop side of a hotel crib, but these retrofit kits do not make the crib compliant with the new crib safety standards. Due to the many safety standards in these new regulations, the cribs need to be originally manufactured with these regulations in mind.

Impact of Safe Hotel Cribs

With these new regulations, all non-compliant cribs in hotels and day care facilities will be banned. This is a ban on the use of any non-compliant crib regardless of purchase or manufacturing date. These regulations for all child care and hotel cribs are so stringent because for many years there had been an alarmingly high rate of failures of crib hardware and component parts. Due to weak regulations, many deaths and injuries resulted that could have been avoided.

With these new crib safety standards, you can trust that all hotel cribs are a safe place for your infant or toddler to sleep. Knowing that your child is safe in their crib will make your hotel stay much more enjoyable and worry-free.

By: Foundations

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A hotel crib is designed to enable an infant or toddler to sleep comfortably when they are away from home. Find out how new crib safety standards are making hotel cribs safer for your child.