Behind the numbers

Now we have announced this year’s brilliant winners, it’s time to pause for a deeper dive into the data – you’ll be surprised to see just how revealing our survey can be!

The survey in detail

There’s even more to this survey than a list of winners!

Dig a little deeper and there’s all sorts of information to learn about caravanners, their buying habits, and industry trends.

One of the most interesting is a shift towards pre-owned tourers. Usually, the majority of respondents have bought new vans, but this year, 52.2% have purchased a pre-owned caravan. This might reflect the tightening of purse strings as the cost of living remains high.

Everything seems to be so expensive at the moment, and caravans are no exception.

This year, the average price of a new caravan in the survey is £30,921. That’s a big jump on the £27,426 average of last year, which in turn was an increase on £24,395 in the 2022 survey.

The typical cost of pre-owned caravans has also increased year on year. The average price paid by survey respondents was £14,992, up from £13,964.

Among new van buyers, there has been a big increase in those spending over £30,000. This now accounts for 42.6% of the market, up from 26.6% last year. It seems that we need to have ever deeper pockets to afford a brand-new caravan.

As those caravan prices have climbed, so has the average age of our survey respondents, albeit only slightly. The average new caravan owner is now 62.9, while pre-owned van buyers are 60 years old.

Relatively few younger van owners are completing the survey. Just 4.1% of new van owners are aged under 45, down from 4.3% in 2023.

Among pre-owned caravan buyers, 10.4% are under 45, matching the percentage in last year’s survey.

The older demographic of the survey’s respondents makes it no surprise that most are caravanning without children. Some 87.7% of new caravan

buyers have no children in their household, and 78.8% of pre-owned caravan owners.

Those numbers are broadly consistent with past years.

Motor movers remain hugely popular. Some 90.5% of new caravan owners have a mover fitted, and 85.1% of pre-owned caravan buyers.

What goes wrong

Reliability is a hugely important element of any good caravan. Our Owner Satisfaction Survey goes into enormous detail, examining how often faults occur and which components are most likely to be faulty.

Unfortunately, this year’s survey sees an increase in the

number of faults being reported. Among new owners, 6.8% have had to take their caravan back to the dealer to have a problem addressed five times or more. That’s up from the 4.8% you reported last year.

Just 0.7% of pre-owned caravan buyers have been this unlucky, but that’s still quite

a jump from 0.3% last year.

The number of fault-free caravans is also down. Some 33.7% of new caravans have never been faulty, down from 36.6% last year. The figure for pre-owned caravans is 68.1%, down from 69.4% last year.

If you’ve seen the results of our previous surveys, you’ll know that spending more on a brand-new van doesn’t mean experiencing fewer faults than buying pre-owned – quite the opposite. It seems first owners are continuing to troubleshoot, to the benefit of the second and third owners.

Some problems crop up all too frequently, with the biggest bugbear being the standard of fit and finish. This was listed as a fault by a worrying 55.5% of new caravan buyers, up from 37% last year.

Among pre-owned caravans, that drops to 20.3%, although this is a rise compared with the results in our 2023 survey.

The single most concerning area for pre-owned caravan owners is water ingress, with this fault occurring in 23.7% of caravans. This is one of the few areas in which new caravans perform better than older models, with 13.8% suffering from this problem. That’s up from 8.8% last year.

Faults with white goods, electrics, the water supply and the washroom all crop up more often than last year for both new and pre-owned vans.

While the data tells us what is happening, it doesn’t tell us why. Many of the caravans in the 2024 survey were bought in 2020 and 2021, when high demand combined with factory shutdowns and difficult working conditions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Did that negatively affect overall quality control?

If that’s the case, you would expect the number of faults to drop back again over the next year or two. We shall see.