UK caravan importers fight back

Fully imported British caravans are now the scarcest they have been for many years on the Australian market, plummeting to just a hundred or so a year according to the latest industry stats.

But the RV ‘ Brexit’ is about to be reversed, thanks to an infusion of Aussie know-how.

After British-built caravan sales peaked here in 2014, Bailey Australia stopped importing fully-built Bristol-built models two years ago in order to concentrate on developing its local Rangefinder cousins.

But now Bristol Baileys will bounce back in September, with the previously most popular UK-sourced model – the Unicorn IV Pamplona – about to be ‘naturalised’.

Instead of arriving fully imported, it will be completed at Bailey Australia’s Campbellfield, Victoria factory, with is narrower British body bolted to a locally-designed and manufactured chassis. It will also have much greater water capacity for free-camping, a greater payload and will be fitted with a locally-supplied Dometic full-height door, rather than the split barn-style entry door beloved by the British and European buyers, who don’t have to deal with our flies.

Meanwhile Bailey’s main UK rival Swift is also making a return to the Australian market with its ‘Australianised’ full-imported 2018 range, displaying three new models at the recent Queensland Caravan Supershow in Brisbane.

Bailey Australia’s Managing Director Adrian Van Geelen refuted the idea that British caravans had been driven out of the Australian market by other imports, despite statistics that the number of imported Chinese-built campers and caravans more than doubled over the past six years, from less than 500 a month to a high of 1113 in May this year.

“The majority of the Chinese growth in Australia has been in camper trailers, not caravans,” said Van Geelen. “Of the caravans, we are only seeing one or two fully-imported Chinese caravan brands making any progress, although with the number of RV components now made overseas, the Chinese-manufactured percentage of even the most ‘Australian’ of all our home-grown caravans could be as high as 60 per cent.”

Van Geelen said it wasn’t any deficiencies in fully imported British caravans that daunted buyers, but our unique travelling conditions.

“Buyers love many features of British caravans, including their light weight that allows them to be towed by even light SUVs, their style and décor,” he said, “but they believe they don’t have enough ground clearance, their chassis and corner jacks don’t look robust enough for our conditions and their typically skinny single jockey wheels won’t work in our sand or mud.

“So we are overcoming these preconceptions by putting our most popular British caravan model on Australian underpinnings and equipping it with features that Australians expect on their touring caravans.

“This has taken a little while to arrange, so we stopped importing fully-built British vans to concentrate on that and expanding our local Rangefinder brand”.