Hi I'm looking to buy a traditional trailer tent, and am considering either a cabanon, conway, raclet or trigano. I've had a pop up before and liked it but it was not really spacious enough. I love the cabanon stratos but it is beyond my budget of about £500. I seem to remember hearing that conways were a pain to set up and wondered if there's much difference in set up times between the brands?
All the traditional design trailer tents are much of a muchness in setup time. The cabins all go up quickly, the setup time for the awning depends on how many sections there are and how many you choose to use and then after that it's all about pegging down (time for this increases with size) and how many inners/groundsheets you want to put in. The more pieces you have to handle, the more time consuming! A basic Conway will be quicker to put up than a complex Cabanon, put it that way. It's not that there's anything that different about Conways.
Our big Conway Camargue takes about an hour to set up, that's for cabin, awning, awning extension section, sun canopy, two undertents, cabin inners and groundsheets. I don't tend to use the awning inners but they would take another ten minutes or so. That's for two people, one 5'2" and one 6'4", both of whom have put up this particular TT many times over the years. (But who still argue about it...!)
And then it takes us another half hour to do things like make up the beds and erect all the furniture. We have friends though with a similar sized TT that take two hours to do their inside setup, they have a camping wardrobe, larder, cupboard, rugs, hanging wotsits etc etc. Often it's not so much what tent you use, it's what you chose to put into it.
We had a large trigano (now sold) we had loads of stuff with us including toilets wardrobes etc etc. Used to take us 2 hours from arriving on pitch to settling down and having a brew. (or on the stressful rainy set ups a bottle of wine) after years of this we decided 2 hours was unsatisfactory and this is why sold it. There was nothing wrong with the tent however, triganos are fabulous and extremely sturdy in bad weather. However that was our set up time. Without some of the internal stuff we could have managed without I dare say we could have done it in an hour and a half. Still a long time really.
Good luck and hope you find what you're looking for.
Having owned both the raclet and now the trigano I would opt for a raclet our raclet (from the 70's) did not survive this winter so we had to buy another TT.
After a long time on ebay we brought a Trigano it was £400 and is amazing dont get me wrong but the way the cabin is erected seems inferior, the storage boxes seem week and the same goes for a lot of the other smaller details.
Edit
Sorry forgot setup time, it does not differ to much the raclet was simpler to adjust the main cabin for slopes etc but saving at most a minuter or two, the awning takes the time and that goes for any tt and after a few goes they all take about the same amount of time
Our Conway Corniche took about an hour to pitch from start to finish.
It had loads of space. I love the Dandy, but do miss the space of the big awning on the Corniche.
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Topic: Which traditional TT is easiest to erect.
