James Brown

A QUICK UPDATE: After months of waiting to hear back on our request for compensation for the long clusterfu*k of issues we endured (detailed in the following review) we finally got an email offering us an $80 voucher for a future Roadsurfer adventure that we are never going to take.

What a piece of sh*t organization.

1. When we picked up our RV we discovered that our black water tanks was, according to Ryan and his flashlight, "about 1/3 full." I'm guessing the gray water tank was even fuller because our sink and shower started backing up the first morning...requiring us to find a spot to dump out way before we expected. Hard to imagine how this could happen since Roadsurfer goes to great lengths to explain the importance of returning the RV fully dumped out...even going so far as to threaten a $500 fee for transgressors...hard to understand why we had to take one that wasn't properly dumped out. But that was nothing compared to the inconvenience of...

2. Our first night we stayed at a pristine campsite that didn't have hookups and discovered that despite Ryan's assurance that the battery should provide power for a day or two our lights started dimming in 20 minutes and went out after 30, which meant that if we wanted lights and running water we had to turn on the engine or the generator.

3. The next day we called and after about 15 minutes of being on hold were connected with a customer service agent in Germany (???) who suggested that maybe the battery was in shutdown mode and that when we got to a site with shore power it should reset after about 30 minutes.

4. Sadly, that didn't work and so we came to the conclusion that we were stuck with a bad battery. Our customer service rep said we could choose to get the battery replaced ourselves on-route and then put in for reimbursement. We declined that opportunity, which meant that we had to cut short out trip by two night because the campsites we had booked didn't have hookups which meant we would be without running water and lights for those stays. Bummer.

Miscellaneous complaints...

Oh, and along the way we discovered that the main blind in seating area wouldn't stay up on it's own and had to be held in place by tape, the screw holding the tension cords on the left side kept falling out and had to be duct taped into place and one of the screws holding the table to the wall fell out which led us to discover that actually 5 of the screws were missing (which is why the table is so wobbly) requiring us to find a hardware store, purchase screws and fix it ourselves. Oh, and the fan above the stove doesn't work, which meant the smoke alarm would go off every time we cooked something, requiring is to remove it's battery, and the igniter on the stove didn't work at all...thankfully we brought a portable camp lighter. Oh...and the key that locks the trunk was bent and broken and it was pretty much impossible to lock the trunk without fear of snapping the key off in the process.

To sum up I would say that I hope our experience is an outlier...but it was still our experience and so felt it necessary to make this report so you know what's possible. Maybe our RV just fell through the cracks, or maybe the maintenance crew is just really sloppy at checking the vehicles over before renting them to the next customer. I mean...how hard can it be to run a basic battery-health check? How hard could it be to go through the unit and check things like the exhaust fan on the stove? How hard could it be to attend to know trouble spots like the blinds and the wobbly table and make sure all the screws are in place?

There were at least 15 RVs of the type we rented on the lot at the time we picked ours up. Hard to believe that ours was the most roadworthy...and yet that's the one we got.

And so that's the review Roadsurfer gets from me.