My old homemade campervan, the BRV
I have a soft spot for the concept of motorhomes. It seems so fun to be self-contained in a vehicle; you can go anywhere, and your bed is right there with you. In this vein, about five years ago my wife got me a campervan for my birthday. It was a homemade version: an old Dodge cargo van that she outfitted with a convertible futon bed, curtains, lights and other useful travel gear. We affectionately name it the Big Red Van or BRV for short (the van had it’s own blog for a year).
You can go sleep in places like this (Tuolumne Meadows) with a bed in your car
While we had some fun road trips in our brief foray into the world of campervans, ultimately we ended up selling the BRV after too many parking tickets and not enough use. At this point in our lives that’s not our top choice for vacation travel. Still I think motorhomes are a great way to explore some parts of the world. And the growth of peer-to-peer motorhome rental businesses is making this easier and cheaper.
I only have a few peer-to-peer motorhome rental sites listed in my spreadsheet, and I noticed that I had split them between the Rental Lodging category and the Transportation category. I decided to create a new category under Lodging called Motorhome for these businesses. Arguably they could go under Transportation, but the limitations of my simple Google spreadsheet forced me to choose just one category. Hopefully this will be intuitive to most people.
And with that introduction, here are two new peer-to-peer motorhome rental sites in my sharing economy travel services spreadsheet. One is actually new, while the other has been around for 5 years but it’s new to me and my spreadsheet.
Originally JeLoueMonCampingCar, IRentMyMotorhome is the English version of this French company that’s been facilitating peer-to-peer camper rentals since 2011. IRentMyMotorhome is an online platform connecting private motorhome and campervan owners and people wanting to rent one for a drive around Europe. IRentMyMotorhome claims to be the largest private motorhome fleet in Europe (they have over 2000 vehicles listed).
IRentMyMotorhome.com
In the United States we have a new peer to peer RV rental website that launched in 2015, GoRVnow. They don’t have many listings yet, but they also don’t have much competition.
GoRVNow.com