If you try to book a park-up spot on a tourist trail for your campervan this June bank holiday weekend, you will probably be told none are available.
This form of tourism is at an all-time high. More than 20,000 campervans are under licence in Ireland. The boom in ownership has come since the Covid pandemic; more than a third of those have been registered since 2020. Understandably, the pandemic was a catalyst for a product driven by a desire for independent travel after stay-at-home lockdowns and pandemic restrictions.
Ireland is well positioned for campervan trips. The country’s scenery and coastal routes are dotted with internationally renowned tourist attractions and there is no shortage of high-quality hikes, trails and surf spots to entice active travellers.
However, infrastructure is often lacking.
Campervan owners face pushback from locals and councils, which often introduce vehicle height barriers and ban overnight parking near beaches. Toilet and waste management facilities, particularly in rural locations, can be scarce.
John Whelan has been running Vanhalla – Camping Heaven, a blog and resource for motorhome enthusiasts, since before the pandemic.
He converted his Ford Transit into a campervan about 10 years ago; the alternative is to buy a factory-built motorhome directly at a higher price.
“It’s quite an outlay so it’s important that people get it right,” he says.
“I always suggest to people to try it out first rather than investing and finding out the hard way. There’s nothing as sorry as seeing buyer regret, and a motorhome parked up in someone’s drive for 50 weeks of the year is not the way to enjoy it.”
Whelan and his wife, Grazyna Rekosiewicz, were already avid campers, both in Ireland and in France, which is widely recognised as one of the most welcoming countries for campervans.
They were accustomed to using tents, sleeping bags and gas stoves. He stresses the reality of owning a motorhome isn’t too far removed from that experience.
“We had the camping bug, I suppose, and then decided to take the plunge,” says Whelan. “I think some people wait too long to do it. Some people talk about doing it when they retire. I would suggest doing it when you have that feeling, that desire, that energy and capacity to do it.”
[ Ireland’s campervan boom: ‘Most people will spend €45k to €50k’Opens in new window ]
Buying their campervan was “one of the best things we’ve ever done”, he says.
Whelan pushes back on the view that campervan owners don’t contribute as much to a local economy as a regular tourist staying in a fixed accommodation; he argues that savings on accommodation are reinvested elsewhere.
“They do spend generously, and that is established on all other aspects. They need refreshments, entertainment, food,” he said.
The absence of basic facilities became more pronounced over the pandemic, Whelan says, when pubs, hotels and restaurants were closed. While vehicles have toilets on board, owners need access to waste disposal facilities.
“If you go to France, Spain or Portugal, even the most remote little beach has litter bins and cold-water faucet showers just to rinse yourself,” he says.
He says campervans are self-sufficient “from a toilet point of view” but they need waste disposal for “greywater” and emptying “toilet cassettes”.
“Usually, people want to be able to empty their cassettes, their greywater and their rubbish, get some freshwater and have a shower. To be honest, that’s not a big deal to ask for,” he says.
Some local authorities have embraced campervan business with Aire sites, designated spots for campers with power and water at a low cost, including at sites in Sneem, Co Kerry; Portumna in Co Galway; and Dungarvan in Co Waterford.
“They realise that it’s an economic driver for hospitality and employment in their areas,” says Whelan.
Motorhome enthusiasts range from the young family with children to activity-driven surfers, hikers or mountain-bikers to retired couples.
“It’s a fairly diverse community,” he says.
In contrast to other forms of tourism, campervan travel is all year round, with some campsites extending their season.
“If you look at photographs taken last week around the campsites of Ireland, there wasn’t a park-up to be got in places like Doolin and so on,” says Whelan.
Campervans are also changing.
David Hanley, a founder of Ennistymon-based Vanderlust, who builds about 40 custom campervans a year for clients in his Co Clare business, says demand for more compact vehicles has spiked in the camping community.
“Quite a few families have cottoned on to the fact that they can have a small transporter that they can use at the weekend that couples as a camper but also as a daily driver,” he says.
“That’s one facet that’s exploded hugely. A lot of people also started with large motorhomes and, after touring the country, realised that it’s quite hard because of the narrow roads so they go to the van conversions which are a little bit more suited to Irish roads.”
The length of time it takes Vanderlust to build a custom van varies, and it is also trying to facilitate the self-builds that have grown in popularity.
Hanley says the company uses 3D software to design and builds vans and a lot of its jobs are bespoke, “which is the reason people come to us”.
“We have just launched some flat-pack furniture for the self-builders, which takes out a lot of the legwork of building your van,” he says.
A lot of people used them during the lockdown. Some people were very nice, and some were not so nice
— Bill Lupton, founder of the Motorcaravan Club of Ireland
On infrastructure, Hanley shares many of Whelan’s frustrations. He believes a taskforce should be put in place to properly address the issue.
“If you compare it with the likes of France, it’s shockingly bad. But they’ve had an industry since the ’60s and they’ve built upon that,” he said.
“Some councils are a lot more forward thinking, and they’ve put infrastructure in place, but there’s others that haven’t, unfortunately.
“Because there’s been an explosion in the number of campervans on the road, there has been quite a bit of backlash from councils.”
This month Jimmy Brogan, an Independent councillor in Donegal, called for campervan culture to be embraced and new facilities to be built amid renewed concerns over the large number of vehicles parked at scenic spots in the county.
When Bill Lupton bought his first campervan in 1983, it was a much less common venture. Tax was high and insurance was hard to come by. He decided to set up the Motorcaravan Club of Ireland (MCCI). Today it has 2,000 members. In addition to facilitating insurance, the club connects people with pubs around the country that can offer space to park overnight.
He has seen the attitude around campervan culture change. In earlier years, he says, there was a great novelty around driving a campervan. Nowadays there can be more scepticism, and though he believes 90 per cent of owners are good and well-meaning, some give campervans a bad name.
“In the early days, when we were really stuck for tourism at the time, we did an awful lot of hard work to try and get the tourism board onside,” says Lupton.
The club went to Britain and Europe to sell what Ireland had to offer and “a freedom that you wouldn’t get anywhere else”, he says.
“We got a lot of people from the UK coming over here.
“In the last few years, since Covid, it went absolutely loony – people buying campers. A lot of people used them during the lockdown because they had a freedom to go where they liked and how they liked, bringing their house on their back.
“Some people were very nice, and some were not so nice.”
Working with almost 20,000 members over the years, Lupton has seen the Irish interest in campervans rise and rise.
The infrastructure to support, in many ways, has yet to follow.
