Decathlon Quechua - Air Seconds 4.1

Stay away from Decathlon if you wanna camp in peace. Some of their tent models have severe engineering faults almost as if a total noob derived from any common sense designed them and nobody ever bothered testing them outdoors either. I've actually spoken with a regional manager about this once and the problem is that Decathlon is soo big that it's gotten really hard to make any product changes at all without affecting supply chain and profit margin. They basically know their products are crap but they cannot do anything about it and customers in poorer countries aren't that picky either so nobody cares. The list is long but here's a few examples: The door on the Airseconds 4.1 is not mounted with the bottom, during windy rain it thus gets blown inside and then acts as a water slide for rain water. Lots of customers have reported this over the years and I even saw it in person when visiting a Decathlon store once (they had their tents set up outside and it was a stormy rainy day). Almost all bigger Decathlon tents don't have fully sealed bottoms, thus insects will slowly crawl inside over time. It should be noted that similar priced tents from Easy Camp (budget brand from Outwell), Kampa (budget brand from Dometic) or Coleman all have fully sealed bottoms. Decathlon pole based hiking tents and pop up style tents are all too short for an average sized 180cm humanoid male, your feet and head will be touching the walls when sleeping on a 8cm thick pad (I tested that myself). Making the tent just a few cm bigger would resolve this but it would also cut into their profit margin. The only great Decathlon tent is the "2 seconds easy" because it can be set up in a few seconds and offers a real 205cm useable length due to the upside walls. I've got the 2P and 3P sizes of that model and spent many nights in them, they're really unique on the market. It remains a mystery why they forgot to add vents on the 2P size (the 3P got them), but I went ahead and added them myself.

My family has a tent that uses inflatable arch supports (three of them), and it has been unbelievably reliable. We purchased it while living in Italy, and used it all throughout Europe, without a single problem. It’s been inflated/deflated too many times to count. We used it in areas like the Croatian coastline that is VERY rocky, and haven’t had a single leak. It works as good as the day we bought it, goin on 7 years ago. Now living back in the US, we’ve used it for camping in West TX, and still no problems. The brand is called Quechua, and can be found in a store called Decathlon. I couldn’t find a similar one on the US site, but here’s pretty much what we have, from the Italian site. https://www.decathlon.it/p/tenda-gonfiabile-campeggio-air-seconds-4-1-fresheblack-4-persone-1-camera/_/R-p-302837

I got this exact one last autumn after being unsure for ages - really glad I got it, it's incredibly easy to set up on my own (even with two young kids "helping") and very stable. I can't speak to it's durability but it feels good quality - the material, particularly for the inflatable columns, feels very thick. The one downside is it's heavy, I wouldn't want to carry it a long way.