We bought the Vango Tigris 800 last year as our first family tent. We've camped in it now 6 times (including twice in the garden) and in general we're pretty satisfied with it. It's not the best tent in the world, but for the cost it's proven pretty good.

It's a tunnel style tent and fairly easy to pitch. Vango reckon you can pitch it in about 20 minutes which is fairly true once you know what you're doing with it. At first it took us about 40 minutes to pitch it, but we can get the tent shell up (including footprint) in about 15 -20 minutes now, but with guy ropes it takes more like 30. There's a bit of a technique to it as follows:
- Put down and peg down the footprint - 5 minutes.
- Lay down the tent & peg one end. Make sure the big door is at least a little bit open otherwise you're fighting a vacuum when you try and pull it out - 2-3 minutes.
Put each of the 5 poles in place. We've found that if you push the pole through then attach it to the securing hooks and fold it down over the pegged end (so that you end up with a stacked pile of poles) then this makes it easier to put in the next pole - 5 minutes.
- Open out the tent. It's kind of like opening a concertina so starting at the pegged end you pick up all the poles then walk the tent out until it's fully opened out - 2 minutes.
- peg the other end - 2 minutes.
At this point the tent is basically pitched, though you do then have to peg the million and one guy ropes, plus all poles at both ends. The pegging out takes a little while, but we've started doing it like a production line and it's a bit quicker that way.

We also bought the side canopy which is a little tricker to pitch but worth it for the extra space. We put all our kitchen equipment in the side canopy, and it's a nice place to sit whether it's wet or dry and it also helps to protect your inner tent from muddy shoes and water ingress through open doors.

Once pitched the inner bedrooms are very easy to slot in place - you get enough for 8 people - one large bed area which can sleep 4, with a curtain that you can put up in the middle, and two two man inner tents. We've found the bed spaces quite flexible and once put up there's still quite a lot of space in the interior.

Great things about the tent:
- it's spacious.
- it's fairly easy to pitch.
- it's quite compact - the tent bag isn't massive though I would say you need two people to lift it and pitch it. Still, for an 8 man tent that's not really unexpected.
- it's fairly water tight. We've camped in some hellish conditions (Keswick in a windstorm) and we haven't had any ingress of water. That being said, there are other issues. Read on...
- the interior is quite flexible.
- interior pockets and storage - you get a couple of neat little storage attachments for storing your nick nacks in the tent.

Problems we've had with the tent:
- condensation - this has been a real problem the last couple of camping trips and I'm not convinced the water tightness is as sound as it was last year. When we camped in April we had a puddle of condensation in one corner which took a while to dry out. It was fairly exceptional conditions (down to minus 5 one night) but even so the level of condensation was poor.
- pole breakage - the poles are fairly weak and we've had a few breakages on the past couple of trips. The flexible poles are a bit of a pain.
- the side canopy is a great extra space but it's very difficult to pitch it so that it's tight against the tent. Also, we found that you need to be really aware of the wind direction because if it rains you can get water build up between the tent and the canopy which then runs down inside the canopy. We contacted Vango about this but they were never able to give us any advice on it. My advice is to pitch the canopy facing in the direction of the wind, that way there shouldn't be any build up of water between the tent and the canopy.
- it can be terribly flappy in the wind and a bit noisy.

So a bit of a mixed view. On the whole, for what we paid for it, I think it is a good value tent but not the best in the market. A good start up tent, but one we'll be replacing in the next couple of years.