Sometimes the Customer Isn’t Right: The Reality of Caravan Hire

There’s a saying in business that the customer is always right. Anyone who has spent enough time in caravan hire knows that probably needs an asterisk.

We absolutely believe a rental caravan should be safe, properly maintained and ready for the trip it is being hired for. If something genuinely goes wrong, the rental company needs to deal with it.

But after years of hiring caravans and motorhomes, we’ve also learned something else: sometimes the caravan isn’t the problem. Sometimes expectations are.

And sometimes… you’re just camping.

A caravan is comfortable. It is not a resort.

Modern caravans are incredibly comfortable. Air-conditioning, lithium batteries, solar, televisions, showers, toilets, big fridges and comfortable beds have taken camping a very long way from a canvas tent and an esky.

But there are still limits, particularly when you leave the caravan park and go off-grid.

Air-conditioning is a perfect example. If you want to run it properly without mains power, you generally need either a generator or a very serious solar, inverter and battery system. In some of our vans, providing that capability can mean spending around $25,000 on the electrical system alone.

And somehow, even after doing that, a hirer will still find a way to flatten it.

Every summer we get some version of the same phone call: “The batteries are dead, nothing works and the fridge has stopped.”

We have driven two hours to fix these “problems”. We have even caught a ferry with a generator in tow because someone was stranded without enough power.

Then we arrive and find the caravan parked under trees because it is hot and everyone wanted some shade. Fair enough.

The funny part is that good insulation is doing most of the work keeping the caravan comfortable anyway. Parking a properly insulated caravan in the sun does not automatically turn it into an oven. What the trees definitely do, however, is stop the solar panels from producing much power.

Throw in a few cloudy days and continue using electricity as though you are plugged into a powered site, and eventually even a very expensive battery system will say, “That’s enough from me.”

Then apparently it’s broken.

Usually, it isn’t. But every time those batteries are drained flat, it adds a little more to the eventual bill for replacing them.

The hirer goes home. We get the privilege of paying thousands to replace the batteries they helped kill.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting for someone to invent a battery that produces unlimited power regardless of sunlight, weather or how much electricity you use. Preferably one that runs entirely on hopes and dreams.

When they do, we’ll order ten.

Rental caravans have actually been used

Rental caravans get rented. They travel a lot, get set up and packed down repeatedly, and are used by a lot of different people.

Outbound Adventure vans in particular have travelled to some fairly remote parts of Australia. We are also one of the relatively few rental operators that allows selected vans to travel off-road, opening up destinations that many rental fleets simply won’t allow.

That freedom is a big part of why people hire from us, but it also means those vans actually get used for the adventures they were built for.

If you choose a four-year-old caravan specifically because it can travel into more adventurous places, it may show some evidence that people before you have actually taken it into more adventurous places.

There might be a stone chip, a scratch, a rattle or a cupboard hinge that needs adjusting. That does not automatically mean the caravan has been neglected. It means it has spent four years being a caravan.

You really can’t choose a van because it is allowed off-road and then be horrified to discover that somebody before you has taken it off-road.

Things break. Usually at the worst possible time.

We can inspect a caravan before departure and everything can be working perfectly. Three days and 800 kilometres later, a water pump can decide it has completed its contribution to society.

A fridge throws an error, a latch breaks, a fitting starts leaking or a fuse blows. Caravans spend thousands of kilometres being shaken, twisted and bounced down Australian roads while carrying plumbing, electrical systems, appliances and cabinetry. Eventually, something is going to give up.

That does not automatically mean the caravan left the yard faulty. Sometimes there is no negligent owner, incompetent manufacturer or dramatic mechanical conspiracy.

Sometimes something just broke.

Anyone who owns a caravan long enough will eventually discover this. The biggest difference when you hire one is that you have someone else to ring and tell about it.

Sometimes the holiday itself has gone sideways

We’ve seen this situation a few times too.

One person in the family is absolutely loving the camping trip. Another is… still considering whether this was ever a good idea.

We can all probably relate.

By Day 2 it is hot, the kids are fighting, somebody forgot something important, there are flies everywhere and the campsite looked considerably greener in the photos.

Then somebody notices a loose cupboard hinge.

Suddenly that cupboard hinge isn’t a cupboard hinge anymore. It is Exhibit A. Proof that the entire holiday has been a disaster from the beginning.

From there, everything gets added to the list. And to be fair, sometimes some of those things genuinely are ours.

Maybe a fitting has developed an annoying drip. Maybe the canvas around the external shower has a small patch of mould because for four years it has repeatedly been packed away wet. Maybe one of the spoons has a spot of rust because somewhere along the way we stopped buying the expensive cutlery after discovering that rental teaspoons apparently disappear into the same mysterious void as socks in a clothes dryer.

Sometimes the van also came back from its previous trip the day before you picked it up and we found a minor problem we simply couldn’t get properly repaired in time.

At that point we have two choices: cancel somebody’s holiday over something relatively minor, or call upon our time-honoured caravan engineering qualifications of duct tape and zip ties, send the van away and fix it properly when it gets home.

We’ll generally choose not to cancel your holiday.

That doesn’t mean every temporary repair is acceptable, or that genuine faults should be ignored. But there is a fairly substantial difference between something that makes a caravan unsafe or unusable and something minor that can be dealt with while you’re away.

Once the holiday mood has turned, though, everything joins the prosecution. The fridge is too small, the shower is too small, the bed is uncomfortable, the neighbours are too close, there is a spot on a spoon and apparently the air-conditioner should be able to cool the van indefinitely in the middle of nowhere while drawing power from some mysterious source we forgot to install.

Eventually someone starts wondering why they didn’t just book a resort.

Trust us. We get it.

Sometimes the caravan genuinely has a problem. And sometimes the caravan is just unlucky enough to be standing in the middle of a holiday that has gone completely off script.

If You Choose the Cheapest Option, There’s Usually a Reason

Sometimes we are the cheapest option. Often we aren’t.

But if you deliberately choose the cheapest van available — whether it is ours or someone else’s — there is usually a reason it costs less.

Outbound Adventure has maintained an average customer rating of around 4.9 stars out of 5 over years of caravan and motorhome hire, and we are very proud of that. But buried among all those great experiences, you will occasionally find an absolutely scathing review with a list of relatively minor faults and imperfections.

Then you look at what was hired.

It might be a four-year-old caravan, a ten-year-old motorhome or simply the cheapest vehicle the customer could find.

That does not mean it should be unsafe, dirty or poorly maintained. Absolutely not. But a ten-year-old motorhome at the lower end of the price range probably isn’t going to present like the latest model sitting under lights at a dealership.

If you don’t want to buy your own caravan, want to keep renting and near-perfect presentation is extremely important to you, the answer is pretty simple: hire the newest van you can find.

Pay the extra money. Choose the caravan that has barely been used. It may have tighter restrictions on where it can travel, but it is far more likely to meet those expectations.

There is nothing wrong with wanting something close to perfect.

Wanting perfect while choosing the oldest, cheapest, most travelled van available is where the maths starts becoming difficult.

So why put up with any of it?

Because camping is fantastic.

A resort gives you convenience. Camping gives you freedom.

At a resort you wake up in the same room every morning. With a caravan you can wake beside a beach, next to a river, beside a dam or somewhere in the bush where the only noise is birds and somebody three sites away having their fourth attempt at reversing.

Kids ride bikes, disappear to the playground and make a new best friend whose name they may or may not actually know. They get dirty, come back when they are hungry and, for a while, nobody seems particularly concerned about screens or schedules.

Adults slow down too. You sit outside, cook outside, have a drink while the sun goes down and talk rubbish around a fire. Breakfast can take an hour because there is nowhere else you particularly need to be.

A hotel is probably cleaner. The shower is definitely bigger. The power never runs out.

But you also can’t hitch your hotel room to the car tomorrow morning and wake up somewhere completely different.

That freedom is the point.

The problems often become the stories

The perfect trips are not always the ones you remember.

You remember the storm that arrived out of nowhere, trying to level the caravan six times, the dinner that went horribly wrong and the thing that broke and was temporarily repaired with a cable tie, some duct tape and considerably more confidence than engineering knowledge.

At the time, those things can be frustrating. Later, they become part of the trip.

Camping requires a little participation. You need to manage water and electricity, keep an eye on the weather and bring the awning in before it decides to become a paraglider. Occasionally you need to reset something, adjust something or accept that a minor inconvenience is exactly that — minor.

And to be completely fair, sometimes we get it wrong too.

Sometimes a van isn’t as good as it should have been. Sometimes we miss something. Sometimes a repair should have been done earlier, and sometimes a problem genuinely is our fault.

When that happens, you can blame us. We’ll accept it.

We just ask for the same bit of perspective when it isn’t.

Because there is a difference between a serious problem and an inconvenience, between poor maintenance and normal wear, and between a faulty battery system and three cloudy days where you used more electricity than the solar could replace.

Sometimes something breaks. Sometimes an older caravan looks like an older caravan. Sometimes the batteries are flat because the weather hasn’t given the solar much of a chance. Sometimes the campsite looks nothing like the photos and everybody is questioning their life choices.

Then the sun starts setting, dinner goes on, the kids disappear again and somebody opens a drink.

Suddenly the slightly loose cupboard hinge doesn’t seem quite so important.

That’s why we keep doing it.

Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes the customer isn’t right. Sometimes things just go wrong.

And sometimes…

you’re just camping.