ROME – The desire for a safe holiday aboard campers and caravans is growing. To probe the mood of the five thousand Italian users present on its platform, Yescapa, the European leader in camper sharing, has launched an online survey to understand what the trends and interests will be for the next tourist season.
With a community of 500,000 users in the Old Continent and over 10,000 vehicles available, the platform recorded a 120% increase in visits to the Italian site in March 2021 alone and a request with a 300% increase in bookings compared to the same period. of the previous year. “This strong recovery led us to want to understand the needs of our community, to structure an even more complete and integrated travel offer – says Dario Femiani, Yescapa’s country manager Italy – From a first analysis, several confirmations emerge: even in the 2021 motorhome travel is once again the best solution to combine freedom and safety. A choice increasingly sought after by 30-40 year olds for more frequent and short-term trips. Among the most desired experiences: natural landscapes and authenticity of small local realities, far from mass tourism. And the best vehicle to go into the open-air adventure becomes, therefore, the camper van that is receiving more and more interest also in requests for information for do-it-yourself camperization “.
67% of users confirmed that the idea of renting a camper was already born at the beginning of 2020 and among them, 32% chose the road trip mode due to the context of great uncertainty. Once the decision is made, 34% choose outdoor parking, 26% free parking areas and only 19% campsites. The revolution in travel habits is forcing those who want to leave to redefine their needs and if 30% do not change their habits, to the question “what will be the future of tourism?” only 5% are projected towards tropical shores, while 60% imagine a slower tourism, in the name of nature, local realities (35%) and even the family (22%).
Preferences range from sea (30%), roads to go aimlessly (26%), rural villages (25%) and mountains (20%), but the desire for 2021 is to drive among the Italian regions to discover Tuscany , Abruzzo, Puglia, Sicily and Sardinia (54%) or to go beyond national borders towards France, Portugal and Spain (49%). In the year of the pandemic, the home was forced to host thousands of workers forced to work remotely and the Yescapa study revealed that 67% of the sample of respondents has a job that allows smart working and that, indeed, this new modality will allow to easily combine work and travel (14%).
Specifically, when asked “Would you like to work remotely, enjoying the pleasures of vanlife?” 74% of the camper sharing community replied that they see this prospect as “a dream”. The possibility of working remotely thanks to a simple internet connection, free from physical presence in the office and thus allows you to open up to the possibility of living and traveling on board a van. In this sense, the trend of recreational vehicles has elected the camper van as the new purchase dream (42%) and users are increasing who want to buy a normal van and then camper it (8%) according to their needs.
However, the purchase of a camper is not an immediate project within everyone’s reach and between a new vehicle and a used one, the trend that emerged from the survey is the propensity to purchase a used vehicle (87%) within the next two years. (50%). “For this reason our mission – added Femiani – is to make the use of the camper more accessible. In fact, sharing your camper on our platform not only helps to support maintenance costs and storage costs during periods of non-use, but also facilitates the purchase project, thanks to the income derived from online sharing “.
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