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When's best/cheapest to buy a tent?

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We need a new 2-3 man tent for our camping trips later this year - we bought a very nice Vango one last year but there was a fault with it, and when we took it back to Go Outdoors at the end of the season they didn't have anything similar in so we just got a refund. We paid about £35 for it so ideally we'd be looking for something around that price or less. We've been keeping our eye on the price of tents for a while and they seem to vary wildly over the year (a friend of ours bought one for £40 and over the next few months we saw the same one at £30, £50 and £15, all in the same shop!), so I'm wondering if anyone has any idea when they tend to be cheapest?

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Go outdoors tend to have pretty competitive prices on gear if you have one of their cards.

 

Don't read too much into the card discount, with the card it is usually a competitive price in comparison to online stores, without the card you could get goods cheaper online. Towsure also offer some reasonable budget gear and like GoOutdoors they have a selection of tents set up in their stores (at least the GoOutdoors nr Bramell Lane has some setup and the Towsure on Holme Lane also has some setup).

 

I'd imagine you'd get most choice in a month or two as the shops gear up for the new camping season.

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If you can get over the Pennines you could visit the much larger Go Outdoors stores in Wigan and Stockport. The Wigan one has them all set up outside, the Stockport one on the upper floor. There's also a Decathlon in Stockport for comparison.

 

You can get the same tents on line, sometimes cheaper because they're labelled "last season's model".

 

But sometimes its much more than a colour change - the new tent may have been improved after customer feedback - so may have a better hydrostatic head, better guy line attachments or even a better ground sheet design.

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We always go to Go Outdoors and I know they generally have the best prices - but their prices for tents vary massively throughout the year so I really want to know what time of year they tend to be cheapest. We dont want to buy one and then see it halve in price within weeks, which is what has happened to a couple of friends of mine. Anyone got any ideas?

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Depends what you want out of a tent. In the past i've had cheap tents, none have lasted too long. Last year we baought a 4 man Quesha Pop-up tent from Decathlon (£100) while a friend bought a 5 man budget dome tent from go outdoors (£50, same on offer this year).

 

The first thing i noticed was the guy ropes, on the budget tent they were thin strings, on ours they were much heavier duty.

 

The second thing was the groundsheet, the budget one was quite flimsy whereas ours is very tough.

 

The BEST thing about ours is that on one trip with these friends, it started raining as we began pitching tents. Of course, with a pop up tent, ours was up in seconds and all pegged down securely in a few minutes. I still ended up helping them struggle with assembling the budget tent in the wind and rain though :rant: LOL

 

This rain shower turned into a thunderstorm and it turns out due to the amount of rain that fell, it was seeping through the budget flysheet and eventually through the inner tent, whereas ours withstood the downpour.

 

Both managed to withstand the heavy winds okay.

 

Oh and ours takes minutes to pack away also. For me it was a great investment, like i said, i've had plenty of cheap tents come and go, this one seems to be a keeper. I think our friends are talking about getting a better tent this year. :hihi:

 

Our tent:http://www.decathlon.co.uk/EN/2-seconds-xxl-iiii-117139448/

Friend's tent:http://www.gooutdoors.co.uk/hi-gear-atakama-5-5-berth-family-tent-p143499

 

 

 

 

.

Edited by RootsBooster

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I don't think you can expect much for £35. I bought my latest Quecha pop-up from Decathlon. 3 man, about £60. Nice guy, gets them off the shelf, pops them up, packs them away, nice guy (French I think) Try there.

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Well the one we had last year for £35 was excellent apart from the minor manufacturing problem with the zip, which was clearly a one off. I could get it pitched in less than 10 minutes on my own, or less than 5 if someone was helping me, and it stayed up and dry through several very rainy, windy camping trips on the moors. Many of my friends have had similar tents and have been using them for years in all sorts of conditions. It's not necessarily a case of the more expensive the tent, the better it is - if you know what to look for there are some extremely good ones to be had for around the price we paid for our last one.

To be honest I'd never buy a pop-up tent because they're totally impractical for going backpacking, so it wouldn't suit us. From looking in the past, Decathlon don't seem to have much in the way of smaller tents that aren't single skin and/or pop-up, I definitely think Go Outdoors have a much better selection.

Anyway, I appreciate people taking the time to respond but I wasn't remotely after advice about what tent to buy - we know what kind of thing we need so all I wanted to know was whether people had an idea what time of year tents are generally cheapest to buy.

Edited by rosaespanola

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OK, that's fair enough! I hope you can report back when you get fixed up.

 

* Incidentally, my Quecha has straps so you can carry it like a rucksac, but I think a walk from the car to the pitch would be plenty long enough walk with it!

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OK, that's fair enough! I hope you can report back when you get fixed up.

 

* Incidentally, my Quecha has straps so you can carry it like a rucksac, but I think a walk from the car to the pitch would be plenty long enough walk with it!

 

Not much good when you're trying to carry a full rucksack as well though :)

Cheers for your suggestions.

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They tend to be cheapest at the end of the camping season unfortunately. Around Sept/October time is when we normally get one - our new tent was reduced from 150 to 35 pounds this year in Blacks :)

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Not last year, they weren't! That's what we expected, but we kept our eye on prices and they didn't come down at all at the end of the season - if anything they actually went up. Seemed very bizarre.

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