Glossop Caravans "ouch!"

Sadly I am old enough to remember a time before the Internet but what I think the Internet has been fantastic for is providing buyer feedback and I very rarely now buy any product before first looking at some buyer reviewers. Unfortunately before buying our new caravan from Glossop Caravans I couldn’t find anywhere that gave reviews on the different dealerships. So before buying a caravan from Glossop Caravans bear the following in mind.

As I was about to sign the paperwork for our new caravan I noticed they had added a £450 warrantee package on a caravan that is still well within the manufacturers warrantee. When spotted the girl in the office called the salesman who promptly told her off, presumably for allowing me the time to spot the charge. She said she would get a telling off later.

Then on hand over of the van we discovered the rear light cluster was missing a weather seal. I asked for one to be fitted to be told that’s how it comes although the other light cluster clearly had one. An hour and a half later we were still arguing and by this time I had 3 fitters round me all saying the van had been modified by the previous owner and that’s why the seal was missing, even suggesting the whole back had been replaced perhaps in an accident. (Not what you want to hear when you’ve just signed the paperwork!) Being an engineer I asked to see and exploded diagram which would clearly show a seal however none of the fitters seemed to know what such a diagram was and off they went to Google it. After getting very angry I was eventually approached by a fitter who said I was right it did need a seal and he would order one. Why did it take nearly 2 hours to reach this conclusion by which time my wife was very upset.

Prior to collecting the van we asked for a socket to be installed. On pick up we could see where the socket was by the pile of saw dust in the cupboard and above the pile you could see wires hanging out of the rear of the socket. I asked for this to be re-done and cleaned up.

Off we went on our first trip only to discover the TV point I paid £75 for Glossop to install didn’t work. The site warden kindly brought his signal tester and found the TV point inside the caravan to be dead. I took the day off work and booked the caravan back in with Glossop Caravans and waited at their office from 8am only to be told at 1pm no fault had been found. I asked to speak to the service manager and suggested he does a continuity test along the line of the circuit. Why should the customer tell Glossop fitters what to do? Anyway he did and sure enough he found the fault in the wiring. The fault took until 5pm to fix and the service manager amazes me by telling me he thinks the reason why the TV point didn’t work after their fitter had installed it was because he thinks their fitter knew it would be a big job to fix the wiring fault so simply left it in the hope I would never notice.

So fellow Caravaner’s I’m not saying don’t buy your dream caravan from Glossop Caravans but I am saying beware, if you do go in with eyes wide open and ready to do battle. Personally I’ll never give Glossop Caravans my custom again even if I have to drive to the other end of the country to have my van looked at.