This tent is a little heavy because of the steel poles pre-attached to the tent, so I recommend having a partner to help pop up and lock in the poles. Unfortunately, this tent was one of three that leaked during testing. While they did seal up from the inside, water was still able to sneak in through the seams, and the tarp over the top of it didn’t provide enough coverage to protect it.
The other tents in this guide all have bathtub-style tape-seamed polyester floors, which is the standard among high-quality tents. The Sundome’s tarp is clearly a budget material, but for what it was, we found it user-friendly. It’s easy to mop up after wet paws and spills, and it doesn’t hold moisture. It’s unlikely to be as durable, though, as the softer, stronger polyester found in our other picks. Marmot uses color coding smartly to help you position the tent as well as set it up.
She covers outdoor gear for Wirecutter and worked on the most recent update of this guide, testing couples’ tents and family tents. Unfortunately, the steel pole in the back of the tent did not lock into position, so this ozark trail shower tent tent is defective. I did not continue to set up the screen porch (which has no floor) or put the rainfly on. I did go inside the tent to stand up and not hunched over and noticed the mesh ceiling with lots of ventilation.
Throughout all our testing, we wanted to know how it felt to be inside the tents for long periods of time. If we had to spend a day in the tent during a storm, would it be comfortable? After first removing the models that failed the structural tests, we slept, watched the stars, and ate our meals in all of the tents, as well as planned hikes from them. I had high hopes for the Eddie Bauer Olympic Dome, but unfortunately this tent did not live up to my expectations. It started off well with some unusually excellent directions, which I appreciated having just come from the Coleman tent and its attached poles. As family friends started to trickle in over the course of the evening and following morning, they started to claim various tents.
Gear up for your next outdoor adventure with the Ozark Trail 11-Person Instant Cabin with Private Room. This tent sets up in under two minutes with the innovative instant frame design for easy and fun camping. It also features a large front awning for protected entry and has a 76″ ceiling height for ample headroom. Use the ozark trail shower tent family camping tent’s included room divider and back room door to create three separate living spaces. It features six large windows and mesh ceiling for comfortable ventilation. This tent comfortably fits two queen airbeds or up to 11 campers (eight in main cabin plus three in private room) in sleeping bags on the floor.
Use a beach tent for a bit of shade when visiting the shore, or use a pop-up tent to quickly set up a kiosk at a company function. Canopy tents and screen houses are great ways to create food preparation areas as well, so consider taking one with you on your next camping trip. Even though the pole was bent, I finished setting up the tent and got the rainfly over the top.
The Wawona doesn’t come with a footprint—few tents this size do—but it’s otherwise all-inclusive, and it is compact considering how much livable space you get. The price also reflects the high quality of the materials, such as the four reinforced aluminum poles, which weigh little yet result in a remarkably strong tent. Car campers who plan to brave miserable weather will appreciate the extra strength and protection of the REI Co-op Base Camp 4 Tent. The main bodies of our other picks are structured with two main poles with added support from smaller brow poles. The Base Camp, by contrast, has four full-size aluminum struts woven throughout it, somewhat like a basket, plus an additional brow pole that frames the front entrance and supports the larger of the two vestibules. The Base Camp also offers more privacy compared with our other picks—with or without the rain fly.
They even asked if they could trade their typical family tent (a similar cabin style to the below models) for this tent at the conclusion of testing. The separate fly, which covers the upper half of the tent, uses a third, shorter “brow” pole to form protective peaks over the door and the back window. In our tests, an experienced camper took only about six minutes on the first try to set up the tent body alone and stake it out. Getting the fly placed and staked properly took about five more minutes.
Both of the doors zip open to the side that’s color-coded blue, as opposed to zipping open to opposite sides. This means the vestibules equally protect the doors, rather than providing opposite entries and exits—the latter creates a situation where, in stormy weather, one side of the tent is always more exposed to blustering wind or rain. In other words, one partner—or one partner’s gear—is always going to get a dose of weather when they head out.
Like our couples’ tent pick, the Wireless 6 is a dome-shaped tent with a tried and true two-pole design. It has an interior footprint of 87 square feet, which sleeps four adults on single pads, or two adults and two or three children, and can accommodate a crib. That wasn’t the tallest we encountered—the Eureka Copper Canyon LX 6 and ozark trail canopy tent the Alps Mountaineering Camp Creek 6 each topped out at 7 feet—but it’s enough space for most adults to maneuver standing up. The tent comes with a full rain fly that adds two vestibules for storage (each 14 square feet), totaling 115 square feet of livable space—which is fairly generous yet still practical for most campsites.