#oztrail

Pros

Overall, the OZtrail Flinders 3p has been a decent tent.

It’s very easy to set up.

It’s spacious for 2 people and there is space left to have your stuff in the tent too.

We’ve used it in temperatures from around 15°C to 40°C and it has been as warm and as cool as needed.

The poles are robust and they have endured strong winds of 7 Beaufort.

Cons

Not happy with the after sales support and the warranty (non-) coverage

The hook side of velcros at the doors, near the zips, often stick to the inner tent mesh when you unzip the doors. Then, you must very carefully unstick the velcros from the mesh, otherwise you will tear the mesh.

The pockets are located at a diagonal position, meaning: one pocket at one side is within reach of one person and the other pocket at the other side of the tent is located at the feet of the other person.

Crookedly sewed.

What’s more...

We made the mistake to not take the tent out of its carry bag to inspect & set it up, when we bought it. We didn’t have enough room to set up the tent and we thought that OZtrail was a reliable tent brand, so we didn’t bother much. As such, when we first set up the tent a few months later, we came across a couple of defects.

Crookedly sewed

We immediately noticed that the tent was crookedly sewed on a couple of spots. Such a disappointment... OK, not a big issue, but it’s definitely something we didn’t expect from an OZtrail tent!

Water in the tent

Then, after a storm, we noticed that there was some water in our tent located at only one side of it. How weird! We started inspecting the tent at the flooded side and we noticed nothing... 

Then, after another storm, the same happened: we found water in the tent at the same one side of it. We inspected the tent again and again and... we found a tiny hole at the bottom canvas material: it was located at about 10 centimeters high from the ground. The tent was set up on a tent floor and the hole was too high from the ground level, so it couldn’t have been teared by something on the ground; it was obviously a defect; a tiny and really hard to notice defect. Even if we had inspected the tent when we first bought it, chances are that we wouldn’t have noticed such a tiny hole.

We dried our stuff and hoped that there will be no more rain during the next few days of our trip!

Product warranty

When we came back from our trip, we thought we should let the seller of the tent know about these faults, since OZtrail offers warranty for its tents. The seller informed us that they contacted the local OZtrail representative and -to our surprise- the warranty coverage was about sending us a repair kit: the OZtrail tent repair tape - described as “Adhesive backed vinyl tape for strong, water resistant repairs“. We were also informed that bad tent sewing was not an issue of product warranty, as it doesn’t affect its usage; true, but it was a matter of expected quality.

In any case, the result after using the repair tape was far from disappointing! The tape was not at all strong and it just fell off a few minutes later... 

We finally used duct tape to cover the hole and avoid having our tent flooded once more. 

Good tent, BUT...

Although it was a decent tent, we’ve been very disappointed by the OZtrail after sales support & warranty.