Hiring out your tvan

[Diana]

Hi. Diana here. We have a 2016 canning tvan which we only use a few times a year and we are considering hiring through camplify. Has anyone had experience of doing this and can give me feedback good or bad? 

Also has anyone done the track trailer/camplify deal where you put 40-50% of the cost of a new track trailer rig and pay off the rest by renting it through Camplify?  Interested to hear any feedback on this too
Diana

[peter_mcc]

We hired them out for a few years. Most people were fantastic and the Tvan's are well built so they didn't cause much grief besides needing more maintenance.

Things to think about:
- how are you going to maintain it? You'll need to service the brakes/bearings more often. You need to be able to get it fixed between hires - so if you're only allowing a day or so you probably need enough parts & the skills to do it yourself
- where are you going to let it go? Sealed roads? dirt roads? Simpson Desert? Fraser Island?
- what are you going to do if something breaks when it is far far away? I had one guy early on destroy the suspension by driving on a flat tyre for 30+kms up at Cape York. Of course he claimed it all happened in 300m... tyre gone, steel rim flattened out, cross member bent, lots of metal missing from the trailing arm... yeah sure. Then he threatened to leave it at Coen because "it was all my fault". Everyone else was great and if there was a problem got it sorted themselves and I reimbursed them
- what are you going to provide with it? everything? nothing?
- are you going to have the time to check it over each time it comes back to make sure nothing is missing or damaged. Sometimes it's the little things - like the hirer who cut the plug of the 15A extension lead or ripped the trailer lights plug off and didn't put it back properly (and didn't tell me) or the people who stashed their used condoms under the bed. Sometimes it's bigger things like the guy who jackknifed his ute into the front box and bent it, didn't own up to it and denied it was him. I didn't notice till a few days later.

For me, I've stopped doing it because I have too many other things going on in my life and couldn't give it the time required. It got a bit old pulling the drums off at midnight to fix a broken brake magent because it was going out the next day. But it was rewarding and I loved seeing people getting out and exploring the country.