If you‘ve decided to try family camping, it’s important to get the right tent for you. Here are a few of the main points you should bear in mind when researching a family tent purchase…

Budget
Prices for a family sized tent vary wildly – you can pick up something for under £100 or you could easily spend over £500. If you are only planning to go camping once or twice a year for a couple of nights, it might be worth looking at the lower end of the price scale. But if you are planning a two week trip in the summer, it’s definitely worth paying more to get a better quality and more robust tent.

Size
Tents come in many sizes and are generally advertised by the number of people they accommodate. It’s often recommended that you buy a tent a couple of ’people’ larger than you need – so if there are four of you, you buy a six berth. You don’t have to do this but it will give you a little more storage space if you do. Also, consider the size of the tent when it is packed away – do you have room to store it and, more importantly, will it fit in your car?

Layout
Think about what sort of layout you like. With young children, you might want the bedrooms to be next to each other so you can easily check on them during the night. If your children are a bit older you might be happier with the ‘vis-à-vis’ style, where the bedrooms are at either end of the tent with the living area in the middle.

Putting it up
How easy is it to put up? Never underestimate how important this is – it’s not a good start to a trip of it takes three unhappy hours to put the tent up! A lot of tent manufacturers now provide short videos online showing how to erect their tents, so take some time to look at these and decide whether it looks achievable for you or not.

Spending a bit of time thinking about what you want from your tent will mean that you have a better chance of buying one that suits your family. Why not go to www.blacks.co.uk to take a look at the wide range of family tents they have on offer?