[row]
[column lg=”8″ md=”8″ sm=”12″ xs=”12″ ]
So you purchased your static caravan. Hopefully you’ve picked a caravan that’s fit for purpose and is suitable for your chosen target market. You now intend to rent out your caravan for the going market rate, But will this be enough or should it be enough there’s plenty more ways to monetise your caravan investment. The first and obvious step is to advertise online. Simplycaravan.com offers a simple to use, attractive and functional online method of advertising your caravan. We will always do our best to gain your caravan the exposure it needs and deserves. Simplycaravan.com provides regular blog posts to help you in the everyday and long term running of your caravan.
Ok so that’s the obvious online advertising base covered read the following tips on more imaginative ways to increase your caravan investments income.
Tip 1: Offer a daily or regular cleaning service
When staying at a hotel you leave the room, go and do your daily activities, come home and your room is clean and your bed has been made. This gives you so much more time to enjoy your holiday knowing you can come back to the hotel and it feel as clean and fresh as the first day you arrived. This service isn’t free. It’s included in your hotels cost!
Why not offer this service in your caravan. I know what you’re thinking, you don’t want to spend your days cleaning up other people’s mess and making beds all day. The simple answer to this is you don’t have too. Local cleaning companies will offer this service for a given price per clean. All you have to do is find one of these services agree a price and a potential schedule. You can then offer this service to your customers for an additional cost. Your additional cost should obviously include a middle man payment for the holiday period. For example if the cleaning service is £100 for a week and you take 20% of this that’s £20 per week additional on your normal rental price in your pocket. Over a year this could add up to a potential £1040 additional profit.
You can add additional options such as: Clean bed linen on daily or Bi daily basis. If it’s a 2 week holiday the least you should offer is a weekly bed linin replacement. Often camps have their own linen service. Some camps already allow private caravan owners to take advantage of their service. If they don’t offer this service arrange to speak with a camp manager. They will usually be more than happy to arrange this for you. Sometimes it opens their eyes to the possibilities of increasing their own revenue by offering this service to all private hire caravans on site. If the Camp does no offer this service there will be plenty of local companies that will.
General clean of the caravan. Again this service may be available on your camp. If you can find one provider who allows flexibility with these services you will reduce the initial burden on yourself to arrange these services for your customers.
Laundry service. Let’s be honest no one enjoys spending hours of you week in the laundrette cleaning you clothes, towels and bed linin. Why not offer a pick up and cleaning service for your customers.
Remember by arranging these services it’s only fair you add you middle man fee onto the deal. 20% is usually a good figure I would go with. If you can arrange any discount with your provider you can choose whether to pass this saving onto your customers or add it to your profits.
Tip 2: Catering
We usually associate Private caravan hire with self-catering and this is perfectly ok. There is however opportunity to offer catering options to the Holiday makers. You could offer them breakfast deals, all-inclusive or even special one off meals on particular days of your customer’s holiday.
So how do you do this?
If your caravan is situated on a camp ask the catering or site manager if there’s any opportunity to offer this service. You could also try off site deals as long as they’re local. What about setting up a dinner in a different local restaurant every night as this will only add to the holiday makers experience and make your caravan that bit more desirable. By arranging these services you should add your fee on top. This is great deal for you as you only have to put your time in at the beginning to get things set up but once you have you can reap the benefits each and every time a holiday maker takes you up on the deal. The best way to go about these deals is to arrange a discount with the caterer or restaurant. This should be possible as by giving you this deal the restaurant will be gaining repeated custom. You then choose how much of this saving to pass onto your customers and how much to take as your own profit.
This service offers great opportunities and could go a long way to increase your profit margin, additional profit of £50 a week is easily achievable resulting in a potential yearly additional profit of £2600.
Tip 3: WIFI Hotspot
If your caravan has a phone landline available to it then this should be easy. If you don’t have a landline then don’t worry read on and I’ll explain your options.
With a landline simply arrange for a broadband router to be installed and the phone landline activated for broadband only. Be sure to order unlimited download broadband so you can’t be stung at a later date if one of your guests exceeds your download limit. All you then have to do is offer a WIFI service to your customers at additional cost. If the customer takes you up on this offer you simply provide them with your WIFI Password.
To work out additional income is simple. Average line rental cost is £17-£20 a month unlimited broadband is then as little as £5 as provided by companies such as Sky. That’s £25 a month for a WIFI ready caravan. Offer the service at £20 a week for unlimited usage to your guests. You will get more than enough uptake on this for it to achieve a profit and be a viable opportunity, you can expect an uptake in the region of 80%. If you expect to fill your caravan with holiday makers for 60% of the year and from that you will receive an 80% uptake on WIFI. You can expect to receive 24-25 weeks of WIFI payments, charging £20 a week = £500 total income. Outgoings for the year = £300. This means you can expect minimum profit of £200 per year. These are obviously conservative estimates but still pulled in a profit. Remember you will also be offering what is a scarce feature in the world of private caravan hire. If you promote this feature you will almost certainly attract more attention than your competitors who don’t offer WIFI.
Take it a step further:
Don’t stop there. Your WIFI signal strength should me more than capable or reaching caravans either side of yours. Dependant on the distance you may need to purchase WIFI extenders for the surrounding caravans. You can then offer the same service to the surrounding caravans at no extra cost to yourself. If you were to come to an arrangement with 2 surrounding caravan owners you should be able to add an additional £1000 a year making a total conservative estimate income from WIFI of £1200 per year.
What if you don’t have a landline?
If you don’t have a landline then there isn’t as many options available to you but don’t worry there’s still some great potential solutions.
There is one option that can be quite simple. Recently advances in wireless data transmission such as 3G and more recently 4G mean internet can be available even if you don’t have a landline. What’s more, recent advances in 3G and 4G mobile hotspots mean you can set up a static router for pc’s and other devices to log into as you would a standard landline home WIFI router.
Data providers such as EE are currently offering 25 gig of data for only £25 a month. A generous offer to a holiday maker would be 1 weeks WIFI with a download limit of 10GB for £25. All you have to do is lock the 3G/4g router away somewhere it will receive a good signal and provide the guests with the login password. Using the same maths as the landline internet connection that’s a conservative uptake of 24-25 weeks per year that’s a total income of £625 with potential outgoing of £600. Again these figures are conservative so you can expect to make far more than this and you must also remember this will give you an advantage over your competitors and generate a boost in interest that will generate more customers.
The second option for caravans with no landline available is to take advantage of onsite WIFI. If the site already has facility in place to transmit free WIFI throughout the site then you can’t expect to charge for this but you should promote this in your adverts it will boost you customer interest dramatically. There are two scenarios where you could definitely charge for receiving camp WIFI. Some Camps offer WIFI as a subscription service. If your where to pay for this subscription you could then provide the service to your customers as an optional extra at additional cost. Make sure you use some conservative estimates on customer uptake and the number of weeks you expect to fill the caravan for per year to determine the applicable charging rate and if this is feasible. If your site has a WIFI service available in its bars and restaurants you can try fitting a Directional WIFI antenna to your caravan. These antennas are sometimes referred to as YAGI Antennas and pick up signals that would usually be well out of range. These antennas are then wired to a WIFI Router based in your caravan. This is great as you are effectively picking up on free WIFI from the park but gaining an income from it.
Tip 4: TV media streaming
You will require WIFI in your caravan to offer this service. Streaming providers such as NETFLIX and Amazon Prime offer great streaming services with massive selections of movies, kids programs and documentaries. Packages start at just £5 a month.
You could offer this service to your holiday makers for an additional £10 a week. using our now standard conservative calculations of filling the caravan for 60% of the year at 80% uptake you total expected income would be 25 weeks at £10 = £250 a year. Outgoings would be £5 a month for 12months = £60 that’s an annual estimated profit of £190. This profit margin can be increased further if you have additional caravans as NETFLIX and Amazon allow you to pay slightly more to stream on multiple devices under one subscription.
TIP 5: Activities and days out
When you book a package deal for a holiday abroad which includes coach trips to the local points of interest, trips to water parks and boat trips the rep or company that arranges this deal receives a commissions or middle man payment. In reality the company or rep has approached service providers such as the coach company, the water park and arranged a deal with them including date and price. The rep then combines these deals and put its together as a deal for you. Customers will take them up on this deal as it takes all the effort and time away from them that it would have taken to find and book these activities themselves.
So why don’t you as the caravan owner offer such a service? You won’t need to book a coach probably just a taxi if required but the concept still fits.
Build a package that suits you customer base. For example if your caravan is booked the majority of times by families on their summer holidays then you should build your package around this by offering activities the whole family can enjoy. Build your package making it as flexible as possible and offer it to your customers at an additional cost. You could easily expect to receive £50 for a family of 5 as middle man payment or commission for a day’s activities this would result in an additional income of £2600 per year.
[/column]
[column lg=”2″ md=”2″ sm=”1″ xs=”1″ ]
[/column]
[/row]
Comments