My favorite part of RVing is that no matter where I am at in my travels I’m always sleeping in my own bed. Whether full time on the road, or an extended summer trip exploring the country , a good night’s sleep is critical to enjoying the daylight hours! Unfortunately, most mattresses that RV companies provide are quite horrific.
After spending money on the RV itself, I came to terms with this fact after several months and decided to start looking for a replacement mattress for my 5th wheel. We have a short queen.
Short queens in the exact 60×74 are tough to come by unless doing something custom (there also are “short queens” measuring 60×75, which is more common)
I took a tour through Ikea and liked the latex mattresses which were somewhere just under $1000.
I also discovered a Tempur-Pedic Memory Foam mattress locally at the Mattress Firm – very nice but quite pricey at $2,000 or more.
Costco’s Novaform memory foam mattress didn’t come in our size so we didn’t even price them.
After that I searched on Google and eventually found two websites which looked promising – Dormia and MattressInsider. Dormia’s website featured some sort of review in a popular RV magazine but had no pricing displayed online– only a directory of dealers. Not too helpful. I called the nearest Dormia dealer (located more than 100 miles away) and pricing for the short queen mattress was $699, and $200 for shipping ontop of that – and would take nearly 4 weeks to show up on my doorstep. Not bad on price, but I wasnt too thrilled after hearing it would take roughly 4 weeks to arrive, and that they only offered an 8″ thick version.
MattressInsider.com seemed to have more options and better pricing + faster production & delivery. A 60×75 RV short queen came in 3 different versions – a basic, firm 5.5″ thick model, a softer upgraded 5.5″ with gel foam, and also a top of the line 8″. Comparatively, the 8″ was $647, shipping was free, and they were offering a $100 off coupon. All in all the price was $547, nice. I was wondering about the quality of the mattress at that point…their website was a little cluttered, but it had tons of info and addressed nearly every question I had. After reading for awhile I called their 888 number and spoke with “Andrew”, who also knew more about mattresses and foam than a human being should!
At that point I was pretty set on ordering but the downside ofcourse to both Dormia and MattressInsider being online is that I couldn’t actually dive onto the beds to test them out. They offer a 100 night guarantee/no-questions-asked-trial on their beds, which helped me feel more confident. The only drawback on THAT was I would still be responsible for return shipping if the mattress wasnt to my linking.
The other thing that got me is that they are American-made – manufactured in North Carolina, and use foams derived only from plant based materials such as soy. No problems with chemicals, formaldehydes, pesticides, etc
While talking on the phone with “Andrew”, a guest arrived at our house so we had to cut the call short – be I later returned to MattressInsider.com and just placed the order myself online. After going through the checkout process and paying with my Visa (PayPal and Google Checkout were options too), I called in by phone just to confirm – and sure enough, the order was all set to go.
It took just short of 2 weeks from the day I ordered until the mattress arrived at my place, so that was certainly a good surprise. It came compressed and rolled by a machine, so it fit into a decent sized box – approximately 4 feet high, 1.5 feet square that weighed around 65 pounds. The rolled mattress-in-a-box was easy to get through the RV and into the bedroom (getting our old junker OUT was another story!). As soon as we cut open the plastic bag it began to make an air-sucking sound and expand. We had been told that it would take a full 24 hours to expand 100%, but after going for a few errands, dinner, and some TV, it was a full 60x75x8 and felt GREAT to lay on (I couldn’t wait for putting the sheets on).
Not only that, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that it did NOT trap body heat when sleeping on it, so when the RV gets a little warm sometimes its not a problem.
It would take quite awhile to run through all the questions and concerns I had, but suffice to say I spent a good bit of time on MattressInsider’s site and on the phone with their rep and got more info than I needed honestly.