Coleman Instant Up Gold: A long term review / obituary

We bought a tent 8 years ago because we wanted a more civilized, private, and comfortable camping experience than we were getting from a double swag. After a lot of research we settled on the popular Coleman Instant Up Gold. The tent served us well until it met its demise some time in the early morning of 31 March, 2025.

The tent seemed fairly high quality. The canvas base is quite thick and hardy - not thin nylon, which meant you didn't have to be too fussy about where you setup. Tent setup was pretty quick, especially after a few uses, it became really easy. We travelled with the tent on the roof rack, and it was comfortable to get it up and down. The bag was roomy enough that packup wasn't too much of a struggle.

Even though there were only two of us, we went with the 6 person because we needed room for our stuff. One of the downsides of our tent is there's not really much of an awning, something that has been rectified on the latest iterations of the tent.

The shade/verandah on this tent was a bit of a gimmick. It provided enough shade to keep eskies out of the sun, but wasn't really high enough to be comfortable standing under, and flapped about quite a bit in wind. This looks like it's also been fixed on the newer iterations.

Inside the tent is nice and tall, so you can stand upright and not feel claustrophobic. It had pockets at each door which were really handy for keys, phones, torches, etc.

What can you really say about a tent anway? It was easy to setup and pack down, and was roomy inside. It seemed to be made of fairly high quality materials. Good job Coleman.

It turns out though there is one fairly major issue with this, and I imagine other similar "instant" setup tents. And that is the elbow joints in the posts that are necessary for it to go up and down in one piece make it less resiliant to wind.

And wind is what we found last weekend in Victor Harbor. Our camp site was fairly unprotected, and the wind coming off the water was like a wind tunnel Sunday night. We went to bed, and were asleep for a couple of hours, before we were woken up. One of those joints in the poles had folded down (like you were packing the tent up), and so one corner of the tent had completely collapsed. Then the other corner on the windward side did the same thing.

Inspecting the situation it was clear what was happening. The guy ropes were still firmly in the ground "supporting" the tent. However the problem with this and most other 2 layer nylon tents is the outer layer is only vaguely attached to the frame with velcro. This means it can move around on the frame if forced. In our case, the wind was so strong it was like it was squashing the tent down to the ground, and the outer layer was just doing what the wind told it, acting like a sail. The guy ropes weren't doing anything to hold the frame up. And so the frame was collapsing whenever there was a stronger gust.

We tried moving the car to act as more of a wind break, but that didn't help. I tried using ratchet straps to hold the tent to the roof rack, but couldn't find anywhere strong enough on the outside of the tent to thread the strap through. The only real option was to hold the tent up with our bodies through the night.

At midnight we made the decision to abandon ship, and seek refuge with our friends who were staying in a cabin nearby. So we did at least sleep through the night.

Unfortately, the tent didn't make it.

The tent was collapsed, but inside the frame had broken in several places:

And so that's the end of our tent. To be honest, Our family has outgrown a tent of this size, and I'd really like a more organised way of camping than a single "box of stuff" and esky, which was fine when it was just two. So this trip was probably going to be the last one we did as a family with this tent. It would have been nice to let someone else get some use from it though.

And so verdict: the Coleman Instant Up tent is great, if it's not really really windy. Unfortunately Australia's coastline is quite often really really windy. So think about where you want to camp, and what you'd do if the weather forecast turned rotten. We aren't usually put off by the weather, but it was too much for this tent.

We did get 8 years of fun out of it though. F for respects.