Cheaper premiums for glossy vans

Owners of hail-resistant, fibreglass Jayco vans set to get CIL insurance discount

Australia’s largest RV insurer CIL is soon to give Jayco a major sales fillip by offering a 10 per cent premium cut for caravans, pop-tops and camper trailers with full composite walls and fibreglass exterior cladding.

The rationale for the discount is that this wall construction is more resistant to hail – an area included in CIL’s standard caravan insurance policies, but a major source of claims in NSW and Queensland.

Jayco is understood to have initiated the discount, as the majority of its RVs are now fitted with such walls. Combined with CIL’s current 10 per cent discount for caravans fitted with electronic stability control like AL-KO’s ESC and Dexter’s DSC and a further five per cent discount for RVs fitted with satellite tracking anti-theft devices (such as Black Knight, marketed by AL-KO as ATS), that could give someone with a caravan fitted with all three features a potential insurance premium cut of up to 25 per cent.

The impending discount disadvantages Jayco’s key market rivals like Avan, which champions aluminium clad composite walls and New Age, which is only just starting to offer aluminium composite walls on its range of pop tops and caravans, with some industry insiders believing this is exactly the result Jayco wants.

“Just like when they introduced their J-Tech independent trailing arm suspension in 2014, Gerry Ryan has put everyone else on the back foot,” is how one industry insider put it.

The move is certain to anger Avan, which considers its aluminium clad wall construction a marketing plus.

The Packenhan, Victoria-based company that builds Avan and Golf RVs had a banner at the recent Victorian Caravan & Camping Supershow highlighting the benefits of its aluminium RV sidewalls.

These included their durability, resistance to discolouration compared with fibreglass, their recyclability and leak-free fixing.

Other negatives against fibreglass raised by some Queensland caravan retailers include its potential to delaminate following prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures, although boat-builders may challenge this claim.

At this stage, it's thought that CIL will initially market the new discount jointly to Jayco owners, although owners of other fibreglass composite walled caravans should be able to argue successfully to get the same discount.

The template for this is when CIL and AL-KO got together to offer a 10 per cent discount to ESC-equipped caravans, but CIL were also happy to pass on the same savings to those with rival Dexter DSC sway control.

The qualification for the discount is expected to be quite specific to include all Jayco composite-walled RV products. It specifically refers to the outer cladding of composite walled caravans being made of fibreglass, but not the inner walls.

Fibreglass/fibreglass, fibreglass/ply and aluminium/ply are the usual outer/inner cladding of composite RV walls, with a foam core usually separating the two materials, although Caravancampingsales understands that the composition of the inner core will not be a prerequisite for the CIL discount. This is good news for a company like Melbourne’s Coronet, which is currently moving to full thickness, fibreglass clad solid ply walls.

The anticipated move by CIL, which is part of the giant Queensland-based Suncorp insurance conglomerate, is likely to be welcomed by tens of thousands of Australian caravanners.

There are currently around 620,000 registered caravan, pop tops and camper trailers in Australia according to recent statistics, with CIL currently covering 31 per cent of all insured vans.

If you take an educated guess at 150,000 of this 620,000 (mainly camper trailers) being uninsured, that leaves a potential market of perhaps 470,000 insurance customers, of which CIL insures about 120,000-130,000.

And as Jayco currently produces around 7000 RVs a year for an estimated 44 per cent share of the overall market, the rationale for the two giants of their respective industries to ‘buddy up’ is obvious.

The interesting thing is that Suncorp currently uses a postcode-driven format to calculate its vehicle, RV and home policies, so it has the ability to reward or penalise customers depending on where their insured property is based.

However, RVs are often exposed to harsher climatic conditions for longer than other products.

Also interesting is that CIL – like other Australian RV insurers – does not reward insurers who keep their RVs under a protective cover, either soft or hard, so a caravan kept uncovered in a paddock attracts the same premium as stored securely in a steel garage.

Cheaper premiums for glossy vans

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