New camper! What manufacturer would you recommend

[Shughes39]

I have a family of 4. Looking for a travel trailer with bunk house, 1/2 ton towable (7800 lbs max) and at least 1 slide. We have looked at so many. Jayco, Wildwood, Aspen, Springer just to name a few. Just curious what manufacturer would you recommend and why? Does it really matter? Aspen offers a warranty for life on 10 components where as Jayco and Springer offer 2 year warranty. Should we buy an extended warranty. Our budget is $20,000 therefor aluminum lighter weight trailers are out. Some campers have electric jacks. Is that important? What are other things we should pay attention to when searching for a camper?

Thank you

[lgarcia]

We tow a really nice Shasta 18ft bunkhouse with a half ton truck. Ours was $11k new, so it is well under your budget. They do make larger models and seem comparable in price to the brands you have mentioned.

Shasta seems well made and has some nice quality flooring & windows. Tank capacity is fairly large in comparison to other 18ft. models. Full specs are in my profile.

We started camping with a very bare-bones featured travel trailer, so there are little things on our new Shasta that seem luxurious in comparison.

Some features to look for that we like -

The electric awning. Manually unrolling/retracting it was ok on our previous TT, but pushing a button to retract the awning when the skies darken for an unexpected rainstorm is a nice piece-of-mind feature.

The next feature I like in comparison is the electric water heater - push a switch and it is lit. No more sitting outside in the rain trying to manually light the water heater.

Another small feature we found we like is the exterior lighting. We often leave after work to go camping and unhook in the dark. The light on the front of the TT above the stone guard that shines on the tongue was an unexpected nicety. The amber patio light can be turned on/off inside and it is nice for a quick look around after dark.

Our Shasta has four manual stabilizer jacks, but a Camco jack socket and the cordless drill we always bring in the toolkit makes short work of raising or lowering the jacks.

We opted for no slides for a few reasons. It is one more thing to go wrong as per above poster. We wanted something "road friendly" that we could hop inside and use at a rest stop, or overnight at a Cracker Barrel type stop that would have plenty of room to move around in without needing to extend slides. No slides was a good choice for the two of us. Since you are four people, I respect that you feel you need slides, though.

[APT]

Need more details on that half ton you plan to tow with. Is 7800 pounds the tow rating? How much payload do you have? How much does the family weigh?

6000 pound dry TT means about 7k loaded with 900 pounds of tongue weight. If you have 1300 pounds of payload, a pickup bed full of bikes, toys, etc, and 500 pounds of people inside, the tow vehicle is over at least one of its other ratings.

Skip the extended warranty.

[Dick_B]

Jayco has been around for ___ years (seems like 100) so they must be doing something right. The more `toys' you add to a rig (like electric jacks) the more cost and the more things can go wrong. To save your sanity looking at the various manufacturers stick with Jayco until you've exhausted their product line.
You might have to go used for $20K.
No, we are not paid by Jayco and, as you can see from the signature, don't even have one.