Looking for a lightweight harness booster.

We are planning to travel by plane to a destination where we will either have a ride with friends or need a rental car. We will take DD's Britax on the plane, but I would like to find a lightweight harnessed booster for DS, which will also serve as a backup seat for home in case hubby or someone else needs to pick up from school. His Recaro is quite heavy for airport carry - though we could handle it...but since having a 2nd booster for home might make life easier anyway, I'm shopping.

The Nautilus would be my first choice for a backup seat, but I'm not sure it's going to be much more "portable" (weight-wise) than the Recaro for airport travel, especially if we are changing planes, etc. One option I've considered is having our friend meet us at the destination airport with the new seat I'll purchase...then we only have to deal with one car seat on the departing flight and two seats on the return trip.

DS is 5.5y, about 40 pounds, 44 inches, and we plan to keep him harnessed as long as possible. If I remember correctly, his Recaro is set to the highest harness slot, but he has a good bit of growing room beneath it.

I'd check out the evenflo maestro or secure kid. And the evenflo sureride. It's a convertible but has taller top slots than the maestro or secure kid.

Thank you. I'm looking at those seats, and the SecureKid and Maestro look perfect (the Maestro even more so because of its light weight and cost).

I do like the SecureKid DLX because it looks like the anchor attachments might be easier for my parents to use when installing the seat in their vehicles. The SecureKid manual says it can be used with LATCH (in harness mode) up to 48 lbs and for a child more than 50 lbs you need to install with seat belt. It's been a while since I did a lot of seat research and I know this year manufacturers were required to label seats differently for LATCH limits than they were required in the past. However, I also read that the "LATCH limit" on my 2013 Odyssey is 40lb....does that just apply to the top tether anchor, or both the lower anchors too? Would I install the SecureKid (or any other seat with a 48lb LATCH limit) with LATCH or seat belt? This seat would probably never (or rarely) be in installed in my Odyssey, but would otherwise be used in a 2013 Ford F150, 2011 or 2012 Kia Optima, 2013 Ford Explorer, which I think have different "limits" for LATCH anchors than the Honda.

I didn't find any LATCH weight limits in the Maestro manual. So in addition to the same questions above, I also wonder what the weight limits for LATCH are with the Maestro.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure about latch. I've always found the limits so confusing. My car is from 1996 so that makes it easy for me to ignore the existence of latch on a day to day basis. My best recommendation is to stick with the lowest limit until we get more info. I'm sure someone else on the site knows.

The top tether should always be used. It MUST be used with latch and is strongly recommended to be used with seatbelt, regardless of weight limits.