How to hire out your campervan
How to hire out your campervan
Have you finished converting your campervan, and you aren’t using it as much as you would like to? Or perhaps your conversion cost more than you were anticipating and you would like to recoup some of the costs?
Hiring out your campervan when it’s not in use is a great idea to make some money back on your investment and help others enjoy van life when you’re not able to.
Hiring out your campervan allows others to experience the magic of van life too
Campervan rental
The concept of a campervan rental is similar to Airbnb – when you are not using your campervan, instead of it sitting on your driveway, you can rent it out to others. Not only does this allow them to test out ‘van life’ for themselves, but it also allows you to make some additional income when your van is not in use.
Most campervans sit unused for most of the year, so by hiring out your campervan, you could allow others to realise the dream of life on the road, whether they want to test it out before committing to their own conversion, or just mix things up and have a different sort of holiday.
When diving into the world of campervan rental, there are a few factors to consider:
- How to find people who might be interested in renting your campervan
- Ensuring you have the required insurance to protect your home on wheels
- How much you should charge
Campervan rental platforms
Instead of going it alone and trying to answer the tricky questions yourself, you can use a campervan rental platform. These platforms are designed to take the complication out of renting out your campervan. They will be able to provide comprehensive insurance to ensure that your campervan is fully protected whilst hired out, as well as providing a classified list of campervans for customers to choose from, which will give you a better chance of someone finding your vehicle in the first place.
Yescapa is Europe’s largest campervan rental platform, with around 10,000 campervans, motorhomes and even overlanders with roof tents available for rental. This means that wherever you’re based, whether it’s the UK, Germany, Netherlands or anywhere else in Europe, someone will be able to find your home on wheels and use it to enable their off-grid adventure.
How much money can I make hiring out my campervan?
Yescapa has a handy earnings simulator which allows you to plug in details about your campervan, and they will email you an estimated yearly income from hiring out your campervan. This will allow you to work out if campervan rental is a viable option for you.
We did this for our own campervan Ringo:
- 2013 reg Mercedes Sprinter
- 140K miles
- Sleeps/seats 3
- Based in the UK
The estimated income for hiring out our campervan was £95.55 per day. Based on hiring out our van for 10 weekends and 8 weeks per year, this would generate a yearly income of £8,217. If you check out our How much does it cost to convert a campervan? article, you can see that our total conversion, including the cost of the van and the build, was £19k. So this means that we could make back the entire cost of our conversion in 2.3 years.
We currently live in Ringo full-time, but we could definitely see how in the future campervan rental would be a great way to let others experience van life and earn some passive income when he would otherwise be sat unused!
Hiring out your campervan: how it works
Below we have explained the process of how you would go about hiring out your campervan on a website such as Yescapa’s. There are other campervan rental platforms out there, but we have used Yescapa in our example as they are the biggest platform in Europe.
1. List your campervan
First, take some photos of your beautiful home on wheels.
Then, upload your personal info to Yescapa’s website:
- V5C (proof of ownership)
- Proof of insurance (read our Self-build campervan insurance article for more info on how to insure your campervan)
- MOT certificate
- Passport or driving licence (matching the V5C)
- Bank details
Next, you can create an ad on Yescapa’s website with photos, info about your van, plus the price you want to list it at and your van’s availability.
The listings on Yescapa look very similar to Airbnb. Simply upload your photos and add key details about your campervan
2. Accept rental requests
Yescapa’s website allows you to review all requests individually so you can accept or refuse these based on information about the renter. This allows you to feel totally confident in renting out your home on wheels.
3. Hand over the keys
On the day of the rental, you can give the renter a tour of your campervan and explain any details they need to know. You might want to make a little handbook to your van like you would find in an Airbnb.
4. Get paid
Once the renter sets off on their trip, you will automatically receive the payment! Yescapa takes a 15% service fee, so you will receive a payment of 85% of the total cost of the rental.
Should I hire out my campervan?
So after reading all of this, you will need to make the decision on whether or not you want to hire out your campervan. Ultimately you will need to weigh up how you feel about giving the keys to your home on wheels to someone else and the worry that goes along with that, with how often you are using your campervan and the potential earnings that you could make.
If you’ve decided that instead of hiring out your campervan, you should actually just be using it more, read our article How to become a digital nomad to find out how you can feasibly make the move to full-time van life.
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