Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
74 of 76 people found the following review helpful.
By J. Yeagley
I bought this Hilo Hut last fall, set it up in the garage for practice and the poles shredded overnight. I contacted Texsport to get some new poles from them and they never responded.
I also had a problem with the zipper, it was missing a tooth or two down low. I put on some duct tape to stop the zipper from going down all the way and getting jammed.
This thing deserves less than 1 star, unfortunately you cannot submit a review without a star rating. How about minus 1?
Bottom line, Amazon has a few other small privacy tents to choose from. You should try your luck with them. The price may look right on this one but be warned you'll get a low quality product, with no customer service from the manufacturer.
46 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
By A. KEITH
I looked at several similar products and their reviews. This product and a couple of similar ones all, almost uniformly, got pretty bad reviews. This one, however, had a couple that said "if you have experience setting up tents with fiberglass tent poles then this isn't so bad." I have a lot of that type of experience, so I decided to give this a try.
Bad decision. First, the instructions that came with it implied that there were to be 2 set of poles, connected by elastic shock cords (pretty standard in my experience with tents). However, there were 5 sets! No mention of which ones to use and the structure clearly looked like it needed just two sets.
Then it became obvious that the desin of the structure needed the two sets of poles to virtually bend at an incredibly tight, steep angle (you can see that in the picture of the structure which peakes at the top...the two fiberglass poles go from one corner over to the opposite, diagonal corner). The poles are simply not capable of making that type of bend without shattering...which is exactly what mine did...consistent with what most of the unfavorable evaluations said, too.
So I tried some combinations of the other 3 poles that came with it to see if I could at least rig some sort of "make-do" solutions. Nothing that I tried worked...at all. I broke two of the other pole assembly and the 5th one was too short to work at all.
This product is truly, in my opinion given my experience with it, a piece of junk. Do not buy this. That Amazon would offer such a poor quality product is beyond me since normally they deal with high quality, excelent products.
I guess I should have given all those negative reviews much more credence. My bad!
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
By desert.kat
After spending over 30 minutes trying to set it up, my husband and I gave up and shipped this unit back. We're intelligent people and this design is most difficult to assemble correctly. Also, one rod started to crack from pressure, so it's of very low quality in my opinion. Bought the Outback Porta-privy instead for just about $20 more and couldn't be happier. It pops up in less than 3 minutes, can get it folded up and back in storage bag in about 5 minutes. No poles, no ropes/guides and no problems! Plus its olive green color blends nicely into a campsite. Do yourself a favor and skip this Texsport Hilo Hut.
