A $200,000 caravan rig or five-star holidays? Do the sums
- Written by: The Times
Buy a $100,000 caravan and a $100,000 LandCruiser, or fly to the places you want to visit and check into a five-star resort. The answer depends on how often you’ll get away and whether you’d buy the LandCruiser anyway.
At a caravan show, it’s easy to imagine the two of you somewhere on the coast, the awning out and the kettle on. It’s equally easy to imagine landing in Cairns, taking a transfer to Port Douglas and being beside the resort pool before you’d have finished the first day’s drive from Sydney.
Both are good ways to spend a holiday. But if you’re about to commit $200,000 to the first one, it’s worth finding out how much of the second you could buy for the same money.
What the caravan and LandCruiser really cost
The rig costs $200,000 upfront, but you still own two assets at the end of the trip. The fair comparison starts with what you lose on resale, then adds what you spend along the way.
Take a couple who buys both for cash, keeps them for five years and uses the caravan for 30 nights and 6,000 towing kilometres a year. Assume they eventually sell the LandCruiser for $65,000 and the caravan for $55,000. These are working assumptions, and the resale figure is one of the biggest variables in the exercise.
| Caravan and LandCruiser | Five-year cost |
|---|---|
| Depreciation after $120,000 combined resale | $80,000 |
| Registration, insurance, servicing and replacement tyres at $5,000 a year | $25,000 |
| Towing fuel at 20 L/100 km and $2 a litre | $12,000 |
| 150 caravan park nights at $60 a night | $9,000 |
| Total | $126,000 |
That comes to $25,200 a year, or $840 per night away. The estimate assumes you can store the caravan at home. Paid storage, finance interest or a major repair would push the total higher. Free camping would bring the site bill down, but even eliminating it entirely would save just $9,000 over five years. The money tied up in the rig is what drives the result.
What five-star travel buys for the same money
Give the same couple a budget of $5,000 for a seven-night Australian resort holiday. Think flights to Cairns and a week in Port Douglas. Use $450 a night for the room, $900 for two return airfares, $250 for transfers and $700 for the extra cost of eating out compared with self-catering. These are planning figures. School holidays, the route and the resort can move the price considerably.
| Seven nights for two | Cost |
|---|---|
| Five-star room at $450 a night | $3,150 |
| Return flights for two | $900 |
| Airport transfers | $250 |
| Extra dining allowance | $700 |
| Total | $5,000 |
On those figures, five resort holidays a year would give you 35 nights away and cost $125,000 over five years. That’s $1,000 less than the caravan setup and 25 more nights away across the five years.
Compare the same 150 nights and the resort option costs about $107,000, or roughly $19,000 less. That comparison gives the resort couple the same number of nights by applying the weekly budget proportionally. Real bookings come in whole trips, and shorter stays would spread the airfare over fewer nights.
When the caravan starts to make sense
At the same rates and towing distance per night, the two options draw level at about 37 nights away a year. How you travel can move that figure. Spend three weeks in one place and the fuel cost per night falls. Move camp every second day and it rises. A couple who spends two or three months on the road each year can get considerably more use out of the rig than one that takes it out for a few long weekends and a fortnight up north.
The other big question is whether you’d own the LandCruiser anyway. If it’s already the vehicle you would keep for day-to-day life, charging all its depreciation, registration and insurance to the caravan holidays overstates their cost. Count the expenses the caravan adds, including the extra fuel and wear from towing. If you’re buying the LandCruiser specifically to pull the van, it belongs in the sums.
And then there’s the cash itself. The figures above leave out what you might earn by keeping it elsewhere. Apply an illustrative 4 per cent annual return to the roughly $160,000 average value tied up in the pair and that’s another $32,000 over five years in forgone returns, before tax. Your actual return could be higher or lower. Either way, buying for cash still comes with a cost.
The Times Traveller view
If you’re buying both vehicles for a month of holidays a year, I’d take the flights and the five-star stays. You can do the reef this year, Tasmania next year and Broome when the dry season comes round, with no caravan to store or service between trips.
I’d buy the caravan if I wanted the road trip itself. There’s real value in taking the long way, stopping in towns you’d otherwise fly over and staying another week because you like where you are. For a couple who will spend months doing that, the purchase can earn its keep. For a couple who mainly wants to get somewhere beautiful and settle in for a week, the resort pool might be the cheaper place to put your feet up.