Kings 270 Tourer Freestanding Awning Review

What’s in the box

The 270 Tourer is an Adventure Kings Plus awning that folds out from the passenger side around the back of the vehicle. It’s freestanding, so it opens without poles, and it comes with tie-down straps and pegs. The canvas is 280GSM poly-cotton ripstop with a UPF 50+ rating, on a powder-coated aluminium frame, and it packs into a heavy-duty cover. Brackets aren’t included: Kings often sells it as a bundle with three L brackets, which is what we bought.

Quick Specs

Mounting and brackets

The awning doesn’t come with brackets. We used the bundle with three L brackets and mounted it on the roof rack. If you have a Kings Grand Tourer rooftop tent, its side channels take dedicated awning brackets, like the Kings Grand Tourer awning bracket kit we use now.

At about 26 kg, it’s heavy. Lifting it onto the roof rack is a job for two people, and it adds a lot of weight up high, so check your rack’s load rating first. That weight is also why we later swapped it for a lighter OCAM awning that suits our Grand Tourer Lite rooftop tent better.

Installing it

We installed ours ourselves, and it’s a job for two people because of the weight. With the three L brackets, Kings’ steps come down to seven:

The short bolts slide into the awning’s channel, lined up with the brackets, but the cover is in the way, so you have to cut into the back of it to let them through. Once they’re in, seal around them with silicone to keep the water out. Check the nuts again after the first few drives, and make sure your roof rack’s load rating allows for the awning’s 26 kg on top of anything else up there.

Setting it up

Because it’s freestanding, the 270 Tourer folds out on its arms without any poles, so you don’t have to set up legs before you have shade.

In practice, though, we had to tie it down most of the time. Without poles, a freestanding awning relies on the straps and pegs to stay put, and that’s the main reason we’d pick an awning with collapsible poles now. Poles give extra stability, and you can use them to hang things from, like our San Hima camping lights.

Build quality

The quality is pretty good, as you’d expect from the Kings Plus range. The cover is a thick, heavy-duty material with a chunky zip and branded zip pullers, and inside, straps hold the canvas in place when it’s rolled up, so the whole awning packs into one long, neat bundle on the roof rack.

Tourer vs Tourer XL

For about $100 more, the XL covers a lot more ground. It mounts along a longer stretch of the vehicle, so it suits a long wagon or a full-sized 4WD better than a shorter one.

Conclusion: Kings 270 Tourer Freestanding Awning

The Kings 270 Tourer is a big, well-made awning for about $500: 9.4 m² of shade around the side and back, with good Kings Plus quality. It’s heavy at about 26 kg, the brackets cost extra, and because it’s freestanding we had to tie it down most of the time. If you want big shade on a budget and have a strong roof rack, it does the job; we’d pick an awning with poles next time.