Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent

May 4, 2023

Designed specifically with large group and family camping trips in mind, the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent is a highly livable shelter for any roadside escapage. It features an affordable price point as well as a lofty ceiling, a set of built-in vents, and a removable room divider for maximum comfort in the forest.

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Comfort and Space

When camping with a large group, the comfort of your tent is non-negotiable. Here’s what you ought to know about the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent before you buy.

Floor Space

A woman and a girl walk near the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent pitched on a lake shore

The Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL is a relatively spacious tunnel-style tent. It measures 16’ (4.9 m) x 9’ (2.7 m) and provides 144 square feet (13 sqm) of floor space. This is large enough to comfortably house up to 10 campers on their sleeping pads or 3 queen-size air mattresses.

Overall, the 10-Person Skydome XL is fairly spacious, though it’s not quite as palatial as the 156 square foot (14.5 sqm) Coleman 10-Person Skylodge with Screen Room.

As a result, it’s best for campers that don’t plan on storing a lot of gear in their shelter at night. If you do want to stash equipment in your tent, the 10-Person Skydome XL is best for no more than 8 adult campers.

Head/Shoulder Room

Thanks to its 6’6” (198 cm) center height, the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent offers plenty of headroom. This high peak height can accommodate the vast majority of campers.

Plus, this shelter has a set of near vertical walls. According to Coleman, these near vertical walls provide around 20% more headroom.

However, the key benefit of this type of construction is that it provides more shoulder room around the edges of the tent. That’s because tunnel-style shelters like this one normally have steep sloping walls that reduce your head and shoulder space if you’re sitting near a wall.

Rooms/Vestibules

Technically speaking, the 10-Person Skydome XL is a single-room tent. However, Coleman crafted this shelter to have a removable room divider. That means you can separate the large central room of this tent 2 two areas. For large group trips, these can become 2 sleeping areas. For small group adventures, this could include 1 bedroom and 1 living room.

As an added bonus, the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent also has 2 doors—one on the front of the tent and one on the back. This provides increased functionality when camping in a large group as it allows people easier access to a door when they need to answer nature’s call in the middle of the night.

Despite these benefits, we can’t overlook the fact that the 10-Person Skydome XL doesn’t have a vestibule or a screen room. A vestibule or screen room would be nice in this tent because it does not have a ton of gear storage space. Sure, the tent has a set of internal mesh gear pockets, but this doesn’t provide as much storage space as a dedicated vestibule.

A gear pocket of the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent

Breathability and Ventilation

When it comes to breathability, the 10-Person Skydome XL offers some benefits that you can’t find on some of the smaller versions of this tent. For example, this shelter has a set of ground vents, which allow for improved airflow and even a cross breeze on muggy evenings.

This tent also has a large mesh canopy overhead. When pitched without the rainfly, this mesh canopy provides unparalleled breathability on hot summer nights. Even if the rainfly is on this tent, however, the mesh internal canopy still allows for some airflow.

Another breathability benefit of this tent is its two large doors. Each of these doors has a sizable zippered mesh window that you can open or close as needed. In addition to providing nice views of the world around you, these mesh windows can work in tandem to provide a cross breeze in your tent at night.

Weather Resistance

As is the case with most Coleman tents, the 10-Person Skydome XL uses the company’s proprietary WeatherTec system.

Thanks to this system, this shelter has a bathtub-style floor. This style floor raises the seams between the floor and the walls of a tent off the ground to prevent water seepage as you sleep. Additionally, the floors of this tent have inverted seams and welded corners to stop water from entering your living space.

Other important weather resistance features on this tent include its fully seam-taped rainfly. The downside is that this rainfly doesn’t cover the entire tent; rather, it just covers the roof. For fair weather conditions or light drizzles, this may not be an issue. But the 10-Person Skydome XL’s lack of a full-coverage rainfly means that it won’t be suitable for use in a true downpour.

The other weather resistance consideration for any tent is its wind resistance. This tent, unfortunately, falls a little short of expectations in windy locales, even though Coleman states that it’s rated for use in 35 mph winds (15.6 m/s).

That’s because it has fiberglass poles, which are more prone to snapping in the wind than aluminum models. Additionally, this tent has a very high center height, which effectively turns it into a sail when the wind picks up—not ideal if you’re camping in an exposed locale.

Durability

Coleman engineered the 10-Person Skydome XL with generally quality materials. It features a 65D 190T polyester taffeta fabric and a 1000D polyethylene fabric floor with a PU coating. Both of these materials are rugged enough for occasional use on extended trips at the campground.

Despite this, we have 2 primary durability concerns with this tent. The first, as we’ve already mentioned, is its fiberglass poles, which are more prone to snapping in high winds.

The second is the tent’s extensive use of plastic buckles and clips, particularly around the shelter’s framing system. Plastic buckles are known to break, especially in cold conditions. So anyone camping with the 10-Person Skydome XL should take care when setting up or packing up this tent to avoid unnecessary wear and tear.

Ease of Use

The Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent is designed with the company’s fast pitch system, which uses pre-attached poles to simplify the pitching process. By attaching each of the tent’s poles to the tent body itself, Coleman has eliminated the need to figure out which pole goes where when you first arrive in camp.

For added convenience, Coleman also designed this tent with a color-coded attachment system. This color-coded system tells you how to align the rainfly and the tent body for a more efficient pitching process.

As is the case with the Coleman Skydome 8-Person XL Tent, however, you will likely need 2 people to set up this tent. Although you can pitch the body of the 10-Person Skydome XL on your own, pulling the rainfly over the roof of such a tall tent by yourself isn’t easy. Therefore, having a friend to help with set-up is ideal.

Packed Size and Weight

In the grand scheme of things, the Coleman Skydome 10-Person XL Tent is a heavy and bulky tent. It weighs 24.8 lbs (11.2 kg), which makes it impractical for anything other than roadside adventures. Additionally, it has a packed size of 25 x 10 x 10” (64 x 25 x 25 cm), so it’s too big to put in a backpack or to take on most canoe- or kayak-based trips.

However, when we compare the 10-Person Skydome XL to other car camping tents, it’s actually a fairly reasonable size. For example, the Columbia Mammoth Creek 10 Person Cabin Tent weighs approximately 40 lbs (19.1 kg) and has a packed size of 30 x 10 x 10” (75 x 25 x 25 cm). So for a car camping tent, the 10-Person Skydome is well-sized.