Should you rent a campervan in New Zealand, or buy one and sell it when you leave? For a two-week holiday, renting is the obvious answer. For a long trip, the maths usually points the other way.
Here is the honest comparison, with numbers you can check yourself.
What renting really costs
In peak season, roughly October to March, a self-contained rental camper commonly costs $150 to $300 or more a day. Self-contained means the van has its own toilet and water system, with a certificate to prove it. That certificate lets you freedom camp, which means staying overnight for free in the public spots where councils allow it.
The daily rate is rarely the final price. Rental companies charge a large insurance excess, the amount you must pay if the van is damaged. Reducing that excess to a comfortable level commonly adds tens of dollars a day on top.
Call it roughly $200 a day all up for a modest van in summer. Over 90 days, that is around $18,000. At the top end of the market you could spend well over $25,000. And at the end, you hand back the keys and keep nothing.
What buying looks like: a worked example
Now run the same three months as an owner. The numbers below are illustrative and rounded, but they are honest.
Take a van like our Nissan Serena Compact at $16,499, a petrol automatic with 59,000 km. Every van we sell is certified self-contained, freshly serviced, and comes with a new WOF. A WOF, or Warrant of Fitness, is New Zealand's regular vehicle safety inspection.
You pay $16,499 up front. Three months later, you sell the van. What you get back depends on the season and how you sell. But even if you got back a few thousand dollars less than you paid, the van itself has cost you a few thousand dollars, not eighteen thousand.
In other words, the real cost of buying is not the sticker price. It is the gap between what you pay and what you get back, plus the running costs along the way.
The crossover point
On numbers like these, buying starts to beat renting somewhere around five to eight weeks into a trip, depending on the season, the van you choose, and what you recover when you sell.
- Under about a month: renting almost always wins.
- One to two months: it depends, so run both sets of numbers.
- Three months or more: buying usually wins by a wide margin.
The resale question, and how buy-back removes it
The part of buying that worries people is the exit. Most travellers sell up in March and April, so private sale prices sag in autumn, exactly when you need to sell. Nobody wants to be scrubbing a van in a hostel car park two days before a flight.
Read how it works on our buy-back option page.
Come and do the maths with us
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