You are sure to need a couple of lightweight folding camping chairs for your caravan holidays, but which is the best buy on the market? The Practical Caravan team is here to help!

We have put a wide range of camping chairs to the test, including the Coleman Sling Chair, the Alite Mayfly, the Gelert Caldera Moon Chair, the Gelert Milldale Executive Chair, the Kampa Tub Chair and the Outwell Spring Hills camping chair, testing them all for comfort, weight, ease of use, value for money and more, to help you find the perfect chairs for your holidays. 

There are many boxes to tick if a camping chair is to be the best out there – these folding, fabric chairs need to be more versatile than you might think. As well as not costing an arm and a leg, and not being so bulky when folded as to consume too much of your caravan’s precious load space, there are a great many other factors to consider.

How heavy is the folding chair? Is it sufficiently lightweight that you can carry it around with ease? You might just be lifting them out the caravan and into the awning, or you might want to strap them to your back and head out for the day, so weight is very important. But you also need to know the maximum weight that the camping chair can support – the benchmark for this test was 100kg (about 15.5 stone). Be sure to check this, as some chairs perform better in this regard than others.

Then there is the complex matter of comfort. How comfortable is the chair? How easy is it to get in and out of? Is it far enough off the ground to enable you to dine at a table with ease? Is it a chair in which you can lounge comfortably? After all, you don’t want to be in pain when relaxing on site. On the whole, if the chair has a firm seat base, a high set seat and strong arms, it should be easy to get out of.

The Practical Caravan review team put the steel framed, black and grey Easy Camp Director’s Chair to the test, taking all the above into consideration. We think that most adults will find this camping chair a little tight for relaxing in.

The Easy Camp Director’s Chair has quite a thin backrest and the lightly padded support bars will press into your upper back when you try to lean back. However, the Easy Camp chair’s size is less of an issue for sitting up straight to dine. And the chair has plenty of good points, too: its bargain price of just £24, its useful 110kg maximum weight capacity limit, and the ease of getting in or out of it. Weighing in at 3.3kg, it is also a pretty lightweight chair, which is good news in terms of portability. However, we felt that it is a bit too big and clumsy to be carried far, despite being easy to fold away.