Rating

Durability: 5

Comfort: 5

Portability: 9

Features: 9

Setup/Packdown: 7

OVERALL: 7

The sexiest little number out there.

The Rio Beach Folding Chair is one of our top picks for a few reasons. We love the way the recline easily adjusts by lifting the armrests, the ease of folding and carrying it, and that it just looks so damn pretty. Some of the other chairs on our list were more comfortable, but for a beautifully crafted classic beach experience, you can't go past this guy.

Comparison

Rank: #2

Open Size: Low, standard size

Packed Size: Small and portable

Weight: Light

Capacity: High

Pros: Fashionable, light, and well-made.

Cons: No headrest, shallow seat and we would have liked to see a stronger fabric used for the seat.

Verdict: An attractive, easy to adjust option that's worth its reasonable price tag.

Skip ahead to First Impressions, Transportability, Sitting, or the Final Verdict, or check out how the RIO BEACH Folding Beach Chair compares to others in our list of the Top Ten Beach Chairs.

Specs:

Open Size: 79 x 64 x 76cm

Packed Size: 68 x 8 x 79cm

Weight: 4kg

Capacity: 136kg

Approx Price: $79

If there’s a place the RIO Beach Chair lets itself down, it’s on first impression. Away from the blinding sunshine of the beach, you notice that the fabric used is flimsy, and although the frame is sturdy, the mechanism for folding and unfolding it is a little jarring. But do we care? Well, a little bit, yeah.

We would’ve loved to see RIO step up its fabric specification a bit to a 600 denier fabric rather than the 300 denier used, which is far lighter than the beach chair standard. We just think it opens the chair up that little bit more to wear and tear and will make it not as durable in the long term.

But we love the way the chair looks, with the polished frame, wood-finish armrests and lovely sky-blue colour already making us feel like we were at the beach before we’d left our living room.

The RIO Beach Chair is a reasonable weight for this style of chair, and we appreciated that the frame and armrest reclining mechanism that we’re a fan of would account for that little bit of extra weight that it has over some other chairs.

It folds down nice and narrow and is easy to sling over your shoulder on the shoulder strap. We would’ve loved to see backpack straps built into the chair as they are on some other models, as we found over our shoulder the chair did swing around quite a bit along the path.

Here’s where we really fell in love with the RIO. For a smaller-built person, it’s perfect. The fabric stretches across the frame to provide all the support you need, and the big plus for us was the ability to adjust the recline simply by lifting the armrests, both avoiding finger pinch points and allowing us to move the chair while continuing to laze.

There are a couple of potential downsides - the seat area is very narrow, and if you’re trying to sit more upright the back of your butt feels dangerously like it’s about to fall through.

There’s also the matter of the metal bars of the frame - not an issue for a shorter, lighter person, but if you’re a larger build there’s a danger that your head would come off the chair onto the top metal bar, and you’d cause the light fabric of the seat to sink until it rested uncomfortably on the bottom metal bar.

But for us, it was a super comfortable experience with a nice variety of recline positions that clicked solidly into place. And - dare we say it - the lighter weight fabric actually did let the breeze pass through to us where we would’ve been much hotter on a chair with thicker fabric.

We really enjoyed our experience with the RIO BEACH Folding Beach Chair. We feel there are definite design improvements that could be made to assist portability, and we’d love to see a more durable fabric used, but for us the chair was attractive, comfortable and took a really successful approach to adjusting the recline angle without having to get up.

Want to see what else we recommend? Head over to our list of the Ten Best Beach Chairs of 2024.

Water & Outdoors reviews are written by our staff writers, who combined have over fifty years of experience on the water and outdoors. We may earn commissions if you choose to buy through a link you’ve clicked on our website, however this does not influence our reviews. For more information, please see our Editorial Policies.