Share your buying experience with Danbury

Hi, I'm a newbie

We finally realised our childhood dreams when we purchased our Brazilian Bay in October last year unfortunately the buying experience was less of a dream!!

Welcome to the forum! Lots of owners and info here to help you get the best from your new member of the family, we meet regularly and different events too so why not book up for something and come to say hi!

It's great that you've picked up a BraziBay, is it a new one or maybe a used one that we already know? Does it have a name?

Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience so far, have you explained the issues to the company you bought it from to give them a chance to put things right?

Thank you for the reply and warm welcome. I am trying to work out how to post a photo of Billy's Beach Bus!!! He's a brand new 15 plate Danbury we collected him in October. 

Yes we took the 800 mile round trip to resolve the issues but unfortunately were met with a £300 bill for a service. The van was only 8 weeks old otherwise we were out of warranty and we would not be covered for anything

Welcome - click on the following link and it will talk you through adding photos:

How to post photos/images

Looking forward to seeing pics of BBB.

What were the issues you had?

Yay I managed to send thank you for the link

The original issues were rusty headlamp rims, rusty windscreen wipers, the suspension was 6cm out on one side, the seat belts needed to be adjusted to uk laws, the window handle kept
Falling off. Really all minor issues we were advised to bring back to Danbury it would be completely free and would keep us within our warranty. Hence we weighed it up and decided it was the best option however on arrival we were met with a £300 servicing bill and told if we didn't carry out the service we would break the agreement and would not be covered under warranty. When I asked about sale of goods and what would we be covered for we were told nothing unless we paid for the service

Looks great - I'll split this topic up as the subject title doesn't really fit with you showing us your BraziBay.

Thanks would be great to split the thread!! Thank you

Hi  I also picked up my Camper in October last year. Since then I've been to Scotland,York, Spain and Portugal. The Camper has been faultless and great fun to drive. I have to agree though that the Danbury warranty seems very one sided. To be fair to them they did point out quite clearly before I bought the van the terms of their warranty. Basically If you don't do their service plan they wont fix anything. I finally decided to bite the bullet and sign up for the 3 year pre payment plan to give me partial piece of mind. Fortunately as a retired person I have plenty of time to go to Yate every 6 months for the service and the staff at Danbury have been very helpful.

I think the problems you had certainly would come under the terms of the "sales of goods act" and you should not have to have the service in order to have the things fixed. However without some legal challenge its difficult to know what you can do. Perhaps "WHICH" legal services could help.
It seems there is a limited amount of expertise in servicing VW T2s (Brazilian or other) and the price will always be high. However those that do seem to do it for the love of the product as much as a profession. I have not used Brazilian Kampers, which is near you, but went there looking for a used model last June and was very impressed with their workmanship and they seem to get good reviews from this forum. Also Litesteer near Hasting do good work.

Hope you enjoy your camper

Hi Billysbeachbus

Nice to meet with you last week and glad we were able to help you..

You have a very pretty camper and by far the highest spec'd Danbury we have seen!

Also the smelly's you kindly gave me are great! Highly recommended to the other user's on this site!

The snags with your camper will get sorted so bear with it ...

Cheers,

Ian & The Team at Brazilian Kampers Ltd

Billysbeachbus wrote:

The original issues were rusty headlamp rims, rusty windscreen wipers, the suspension was 6cm out on one side, the seat belts needed to be adjusted to uk laws, the window handle kept falling off. Really all minor issues we were advised to bring back to Danbury it would be completely free and would keep us within our warranty. Hence we weighed it up and decided it was the best option however on arrival we were met with a £300 servicing bill and told if we didn't carry out the service we would break the agreement and would not be covered under warranty. When I asked about sale of goods and what would we be covered for we were told nothing unless we paid for the service

I have to say that my expectation should be that all that you have said should have been checked by the main dealer, before collection, especially on a new bay; otherwise, what's the point of paying more to buy from a main dealer?

Rusty headlamp rims and wipers? - not replaced before sale by Danbury?

All that you discovered should have been covered by the warranty (actually, things like suspension out 6cm on one side and seat belts needing to be adjusted to UK laws should have been checked before going out/being released).

I wouldn't have expected there to be any question of invalidating the warranty by not having a £300 service at the same time - simply outrageous!

Bumble talks sense

Hope you don't mind me hijacking your post. Looking for some advice on buying process from danbury. We ordered ours two weeks ago from Danbury. Was told delivery was 10-12 weeks. Question is what updates did people get during this time? We haven't heard anything and was wandering if this is normal? And whether its best to leave them to it or contact them regularly

Thank you

I was told 12-16 weeks when I ordered mine in June 2015. Turned out  to be 18 weeks in total and got it in October that year. I did request progress report about late July and told problem was getting IVA apointment with dvla. They were quite polite and helpful when making enquiries but not very pro-active. Amazed they still have some left. Very best of luck and hope you enjoy it as much as I have so far.

bobbo12 wrote:

I was told 12-16 weeks when I ordered mine in June 2015. Turned out  to be 18 weeks in total and got it in October that year. I did request progress report about late July and told problem was getting IVA apointment with dvla. They were quite polite and helpful when making enquiries but not very pro-active. Amazed they still have some left. Very best of luck and hope you enjoy it as much as I have so far.

Thank you seems the same experience we have had so far.. They have one new one left (last edition) but we didn't go for that. They now get second hand brazilian t2 and convert them. So it will have had one owner before we get it.

I built up a relationship with the sales staff and emailed and phoned them mercilessly (I know I bet those that know me can't believe this!!) - all completed with a smile and a wave and on time