The best air mattress for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

If you have family coming to visit and you don’t have space in your home office for a regular bed, an air mattress might very well come in handy. While it should generally be considered a last resort, having an air mattress or two on hand can be practical if you wind up with more overnight company than regular mattress beds. Or perhaps you want some extra comfort while you’re camping and don’t want to put your sleeping bag on the cold, hard ground. Or maybe you’re traveling and need an inflatable mattress that sits nicely in a truck bed so you can sleep under the stars. 

The best air mattress offers overall comfort, adequate back support and the semi-secure feeling that the whole thing isn’t going to lose air and collapse to the floor by morning. With more than 10,000 search results on Amazon alone, it’s an extremely crowded product category, so the search for the best air mattress can be tricky without some guidance. 

We’ve taken the most popular and the best air mattresses we’ve found on Amazon and other major retailers (including Walmart and Target) and put them through a battery of hands-on testing to see which might potentially offer the best quality sleep. This includes repeatedly inflating and deflating air beds, evaluating their construction and durability, and subjecting them to the rigors of camping and a series of acrobatically inclined children’s sleepovers to test them for air pressure, comfort, and how puncture-resistant the air chamber is are (after all, air leaks are counterproductive to a great night’s sleep).

To narrow down the best air mattress options, we confined testing for our buyer’s guide to queen air mattress models, rather than twin size to standard size and included comfort and price comparisons.

You can find most of the warranty information and basic specs, including dimensions and weight capacity, on manufacturer or retailer websites. I’ve included that kind of information here as well as the kind of qualitative details that are harder to glean without first-hand use. This includes specifics that range from comfort, such as high airbed and air coils, to how long an air mattress takes to inflate to how firm it can get, as well as my impressions of its durability and pungency (yes, that’s a thing). Have a look.

Other air mattress options

Not recommended

King Koil Luxury Raised Air Mattress

Amazon

• Price: $120
• Pump type: Electric
• Height when inflated: 20 inches
• Warranty: One year

The King Koil Luxury Raised Air Mattress consistently ranks in the top 10 on Amazon’s category bestseller list. But this may have as much to do with the company’s mastery of search engine optimization and Amazon review gamesmanship as its ability to design a quality product. Fakespot currently gives this bed’s customer reviews — of which there are thousands — a “C” grade for authenticity, which is better than the “F” it received previously.

Still, there are a few reasons to like the King Koil Luxury Raised Air Mattress: The built-in pump is powerful enough to completely inflate the mattress in just over three minutes and it’s quite tall, measuring about 21 inches high.

But there are issues. Of the inflatable mattresses I tested, this raised airbed was the most pungent and plasticky-smelling inflatable airbed. This King Koil air mattress is also heavy. The queen-size King Koil air mattress weighs nearly 21 pounds, though Amazon lists it at 17. Even when fully inflated, this mattress squishes down significantly when you try to get up from it, and I found that it repeatedly lost considerable amounts of air overnight. For these cardinal sins, Consumer Reports has savaged the King Koil, singling it out as one to avoid — and I concur.

The bottom line: Overpriced, odorous and less capable of remaining fully inflated overnight than others.

Coleman Airbed Cot

Coleman

• Price: $220
• Pump type: Battery-operated
• Height when inflated: 22 inches
• Warranty: One year

I’m not a fan of the Coleman AirBed Cot. It’s expensive, heavy and unwieldy, hard to set up and, worst of all, uncomfortable to lay on.   

Coleman’s air mattress isn’t particularly distinctive in any way — other than being one of the most pungently plastic-smelling I tested. To say that Coleman’s included QuickPump, which takes four D batteries, is underpowered would be an understatement. The battery operated pump was unable to fill the air mattress to anything close to its capacity and I gave up after 10 increasingly frustrating minutes. (Some Amazon reviewers have resorted to using their mouths to inflate this mattress.) The pump nozzle doesn’t fit snugly into the mattress valve and you’re forced to hold it in place throughout the whole disheartening process.

But the steel backbone is something else: It makes the whole package absurdly heavy — it weighs about 42 pounds, which is about twice as much as any other we tested, which makes it a poor choice for a camping cot — though it comes with a wheeled, but ultimately unwieldy, carry bag.

The steel frame unfolds sort of like a pack and play — that is, not easily — and has no locking mechanism. But it does have a steel bar running down the middle — which is a huge, body-wrecking bummer, especially when you’re sleeping on a half-deflated air mattress. I suppose if two people are sleeping in this bed, each supine and occupying one of the trenches, as it were, it might work. But I wouldn’t want to be either one of them.

There are a few thoughtful touches — including a zippered pocket that holds the air mattress in place on the frame, and two foldable side tables, each of which has an integrated mesh pocket to hold a drink. But they’re not nearly enough to salvage Coleman’s Airbed Cot.

The bottom line: Hard pass.

What to look for in an air mattress

There are a few general things to consider when looking for the best air mattress. Price will be primary criteria for most people searching for the best air mattress. You can get a queen-size bed for as little as $30, while the most expensive air mattresses can cost hundreds of dollars. But a higher price doesn’t always mean a tall airbed, a better air mattress, better air pressure, a self-inflating mattress, a better sleeping surface, more comfort or a decent night’s sleep.

Most air mattresses have a built-in electric pump that plugs into a wall socket. Some have a battery-powered external rechargeable pump, which usually runs on four D-cells. And a few come with a manual hand pump. The plug-in pumps are usually powerful but heavy and loud. Battery-operated pumps are lighter and don’t require a wall socket but are typically less effective and less capable of fully inflating a mattress. A manual pump or a flat pump, on the other hand, can deliver a degree of firmness the others can’t match and needs neither batteries nor outlet — but will require a significant amount of physical labor to operate.

Though most of queen size air mattress options measure approximately 60 inches wide and 80 inches long, height is both a variable and a selling point. In fact, it may be a primary consideration for older or disabled people who would have trouble getting on or off a bed that’s too low to the ground. Likewise, a mattress that’s overly mushy will be harder to dismount.

Of course, if you’ve ever tried to get a good night’s rest on a crappy air mattress before, you know that the touchstone for quality is how reliably it holds air. And nearly every air mattress is beset by customer reviews complaining about air leaks. You can tell that this is an industry that’s been traumatized by these complaints: Every bed we tested was imprinted with disclaimers, pleading about how all air mattresses stretch when you inflate them, and that you shouldn’t just assume that they’re leaking if they temporarily lose that initial level of firmness.

And yet many air mattresses, whether they’re stretched out or not, do leak over the course of a night. Repeatedly. And even if you top them off. This mitigates the credibility of some manufacturers’ claims. And there are some beds that are simply more durable air mattress options and more well-constructed than others. But airtightness is tricky to judge, even after you inflate an air mattress, and may reveal itself only over time. As such, most manufacturers offer a one-year warranty or guarantee. A few extend that to two years. Others will give you 90 days and throw in a few vinyl patches to cover up a puncture wound.

Sweet dreams

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Originally published earlier. It has been updated with new formatting, but the picks are unchanged from the original version.