Wildcountry
New Member
No customer should have to fork out $50000 for a new camper to sit in his drive for two months of the summer unable to use it.
SUPERIOR PRODUCTS AND COMPLETELY SATISFIED OWNERS
We live on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and we began 2023 with a desire to replace our ageing 2011 Gulf Stream Visa trailer with a larger more spacious unit, but on our first trip to a local dealer we discovered that our Kia Sedona minivan was maxed out @ 3500lbs and before we could move up we needed to get some serious towing muscle so in February we traded the minivan for a GMC Yukon Denali with a capacity of 8700lbs. We spent a lot of time looking at trailer options online and honing out our wish list but with the cost of the above we were not really expecting to buy until next year.
In June we hitched up our Gulf Stream and travelled to Pennsylvania and Ohio (to see “Moses” in Lancaster and “Rory Feek” in concert in Walnut Creek).
Just before our exit in Akron we passed Campers World and decided it would be nice to saunter in and look at some of the new models. We discovered the Keystone Bullet 253RDS and were smitten, it had everything on our wish-list and the sweetener - we were offered $1500 more on our trade than we could get at home.
NOW WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
We picked up our new trailer and drove home 700 miles to Cape Cod with just a 4-hour layover in a Walmart parking lot.
The next day, at home, we discovered the refrigerator was not working, frustrated we were calling, texting and emailing the salesman and not getting much help. Almost by accident I discovered something hanging down under the slide-out, seeing what looked like a shredded garden hose I put my hand up to check it out and saw a spark, it was then that I saw a mass of bare shredded wires and realized I could have been electrocuted. I had absolutely no idea up until this point that campers that have electrical appliances (fridge or stove) in the slide-out have the electrical wiring harnesses to the appliances located outside underneath the slide-out. This is an ignorant design considering the sort of money that we owners fork out for these rigs. As I said this discovery is new to me (since then I have found it to be a notorious problem with a myriad of posts from owners on the internet, enough you would think for the manufacturers to want to do something about the problem).
We talked to the salesman in Akron who said he would talk to his contact at Keystone to see how this could happen. There was absolutely no follow through on this, we spent more than a week calling and texting trying to contact the salesman for an update and to try and find out what they intended to do to rectify our situation.
Two and a half weeks after we arrived home, the service department in Akron told us we should contact the local Campers World nearest to us so that they could send a technician out to assess the problem (note it was we who had to do the calling to solve their problem – what happened to the principle of service?). We called Campers World in Berkley, Massachusetts but they do not have a mobile technician and referred us to Campers World in Uxbridge, Massachusetts and they set up an appointment for August 1. The day arrived but no technician came so we called Campers World in Uxbridge again, only to discover the secretary who made the appointment had been fired and they had no record of our appointment. Campers World Uxbridge made a new appointment for August 9, the technician came and was able to repair the wiring so that the refrigerator now works but they need warranty approval for a replacement wiring harness carrier, we cannot use or move the camper until such time as that is fixed. Another 9 days went by before Camping World, Uxbridge confirmed the warranty had been approved and they were ordering the replacement part but could not say how long Keystone will take to provide it.
When we purchased the camper, because we were out-of-State the dealer said they would use a Third-Party to do the registration, it would take about three weeks, but a month later we received a call from the Service Manager at Campers World, Akron to say the registration documentation was sitting on their desk all this time, it had never gone to the Third-Party and now they thought it best to courier the documents to us direct and we could take it to our local registry, so now I had to go and que (standing) for 3 hours to do the registration that we paid them to do.
This whole process has been quite an education for us, I am only beginning to learn of some of the horrendous problems other owners have suffered. The RV Industry is truly in a mess, customer service is not something to be talked about in sales waffle on the company’s website, it is something to be practiced and when it is done right it is worth as much as your best, longest serving employee. If Keystone practiced customer service our camper would have been picked up the day after we got home and either repaired or replaced by the end of June. No customer should have to fork out $50000 for a new camper to sit in his drive for two months of the summer unable to use it.
