10 Tips for Travelling with a Yoto Mini
If you’ve ever been on a long road trip, long-haul flight or considerable train journey with your kids, chances are you’ve heard the phrase ‘are we nearly there yet?’ a considerable amount of times. Keeping kids entertained and calm during travel can be challenging, as traditional options like reading and puzzles may trigger motion sickness or headaches.
Thankfully, thanks to the wide range of audiobooks, music and interactive Yoto cards that can be enjoyed without a wifi connection, the Yoto Mini has completely overhauled our journeys. We travel down to Cornwall from Birmingham regularly – a considerable drive of around 5 hours and we’ve got our Yoto routine pretty nailed down.
If you’re travelling with the kids this summer or planning for a future trip, here are my top 10 tips for travelling with a Yoto Mini.
1. Pick your Yoto Player
It goes without saying that the small, lightweight and portable design of the Yoto Mini is ideal for travel and carry on luggage, but you can absolutely still take the full size Yoto Player away with you if you prefer, especially if you’d like to benefit from the night light. For younger children, the familiar glow of their Yoto nightlight can provide some welcome reassurance away from home, while the ok to wake settings can prevent those premature wake ups. Just make sure you’ve set up the nightlight colours while you’re on wifi before you leave.
If you’re new to Yoto, you may find my reviews of the Yoto 3rd Generation Player and Yoto Mini helpful when considering the differences.
2. Protect your Yoto Player from drops and falls
While it’s by no means compulsory, I’d recommend using a Yoto Adventure Jacket for extra protection when travelling with a Yoto Mini or your Yoto Player. While the Yoto Players are fairly robust, these soft silicone cases can protect the mechanism and pixelated screen from accidental drops, knocks or damage. Even better, they come in a huge range of colours – my girls love the light green frog soup and grape soda purple designs – a great way to differentiate between who’s Yoto is who’s! Each Yoto Mini Adventure jacket includes a small wrist lanyard too, making it easier for small hands to carry.
3. Download your kids’ favourite content
One of the best things about the Yoto Mini is that once downloaded, your cards can be listened to without the need for a wifi connection – allowing your kids to listen to their favourite Yoto cards even when outside the home, flight mode or long car journeys. To avoid disappointment however, you need to ensure the content is downloaded before you leave and you DO still need to have the cards with you. Don’t forget this step or you could easily run into some difficulties.
Here’s how to download content to your Yoto:
- Your Yoto Player downloads content files to the device when they’re added to your app library or played for the first time.
- To download your content, have your Yoto Mini plugged in (charging), turned on and connected to your wifi. Take each card you’d like to take on holiday with you and insert it into your Yoto Mini. Leave the card to play for around 1 minute to kick start the download.
- You can check the download status (and a full list of titles available for offline play) on your Yoto App, under Settings > Yoto Mini > Audio Download Status.
- If you have a lot of content, cards that you haven’t listened to for a while may drop off the download to be displaced by newer content. You simply need to reinsert them to redownload onto your player.
- Don’t forget to do a test – pop a card in with the wifi turned off and check that it works before you leave
- Please note – some content such as the sleep radio, podcasts or streamed services do require a wifi connection and will not work offline.
4. Ensure your Yoto Mini is fully charged
Unless you’re able to charge devices in the car (or if you’d prefer to avoid the faff!), I’d recommend making sure your Yoto MIni is fully charged and ready to go before you leave.
With the Yoto Mini 2024 edition, you can expect up to 14 hours battery life from one charge – plenty of time to keep your child engaged and entertained – even with delays, traffic jams or congestion.
5. Prepare your Yoto headphones
While on car journeys, the Yoto Audio is high enough quality to play out loud or via your car’s audio via Apple CarPlay, parents may prefer to use headphones, allowing a more calm and personal listening experience.
You can use any headphones that have Bluetooth or a 3.5mm headphone jack with the Yoto Mini; however, we LOVE our Yoto headphones.
While I would love to see them released in other colours than the brand orange, these lightweight headphones with soft, padded cups are super comfortable for even long periods of listening, thanks to an adjustable headband that can be tailored to your child.
The best part is the daisychain feature – a second cable that can link two pairs of Yoto Headphones together. This allows both my daughters to share the Yoto player and listen to the same audio together without disturbing the peace for the rest of us. Ideal for siblings to share or work together on interactive cards without impacting other passengers.
6. Organise their favourite cards
The Yoto Card Cases are a great way to store your kids’ favourite Yoto Cards both inside and outside the home – particuarly when travelling with a Yoto Mini. Available in a choice of colours, these neat, zip up cases measuring 24.5 x 17.5 x 3.5 cm, have eight clear plastic sheets inside, storing up to 60 Yoto Cards.
Not only do I love the hard outer of these cases that keep the cards protected, they also prevent cards from getting lost or accidentally discarded whe outside the home.
The specially angled slots make cards really simple to insert and remove, even for younger children who are determined to be independent.
I recommend taking a selection of cards with you and allowing your child to browse their Yoto Collection and decide what to listen to next. The more they’re involved in the choice, the more invested they’re likely to be.
7. Consider the Yoto Travel Case
If you want to make the most of the Yoto Mini’s portability or keep everything together for long haul flights or train journeys, the Yoto Mini Travel Case is also worth considering, allowing your child to take along the player, charger, headphones and a selection of cards all in one tough and durable case.
Holding up to 30 cards of their choice and one pair of headphones, there’s even a handy elastic loop for keeping the charger cable (or headphone cable) neat and tidy in the case.
While it’s not as discreet as the Yoto Card Cases, we love the fully adjustable strap that can easily be adjusted to your child’s age / height, making it simple to wear across the body.
8. Create the ultimate Make Your Own Playlist
If you’re limited for space or only want to take a small number of cards with you, consider making a Make Your Own Card before you go. Each MYO Card has a capacity of up to 100 hours of audio, meaning you can add multiple audio tracks to one card.
Get creative – you can create your own quizzes, record audio messages from friends and family or even read their favourite books aloud.
Check out my tips for creating your own content below:
9. Choose Interactive Cards when travelling with a Yoto Mini
Yoto have recently added loads of Interactive Yoto cards to their library, which are perfect for travel. From the Ultimate Disney Quiz cards to the Draw Along Cards and the new Spy Club card which was a HUGE hit with my girls, these cards combine audio with traditional play, preventing children from getting bored or fidgety over long periods.
Our favourite interactive cards are linked below:
- Draw Along – creative drawing prompts that help bring kids’ imagination to life
- Draw Along 2 – more fun drawing adventures with good old Jake
- Spy Club – can your kids solve the clues to track down the missing teacher?
- Ultimate Disney Quiz – consider yourself a Disney fan? Nows the time to put your knowledge to the test!
10. Wind down at the end of a busy day
Travelling can play havoc with children’s bedtime routine, so if they’re out of sorts or struggling with jet lag, clock changes or are simply wired from travel, the Yoto Sleep cards can help them get calm and relaxed before bed. Yoto have LOADS of mindfulness cards and sleep stories to choose from, but we loved the Moshi cards in particular, with an almost haunting audio that has a pretty instant affect on my 8 year old.
