I’ve been selling caravans in India for years now. I’ve seen the excitement, the nervousness, the over-planning, the under-planning, and the specific look on someone’s face when they realise they packed an ironing board for a camping trip. Here are the five mistakes I see over and over, and the corrections that come from watching people get it wrong and then get it right.
Mistake 1: Buying Too Big
Every first-timer wants the biggest trailer they can afford. The logic sounds reasonable: more space means more comfort. More room for the kids. More storage. More everything.
The reality is the opposite. A 26-foot trailer with dual slide-outs and a king bed sounds wonderful until you try to park it at a coffee estate in Coorg where the access road is 10 feet wide and has a 90-degree turn between two coconut palms. Or until you attempt to reverse it into a campsite while your wife shouts directions you can’t hear because the trailer is 8 metres behind you. Or until you realise that the resort property you booked has a gate that’s exactly 7.5 feet wide and your mirrors add another foot on each side.
The correction: buy for where you’ll actually go, not for the maximum floor plan that makes you feel good at the showroom. If you’re in Bengaluru and your trips will be Coorg, Goa, Wayanad, and the Nilgiris, you need a 16 to 20 foot trailer. That’s the Catalina 134RDX (16 feet, couples: 134RDX) or the 164BHX (19.5 feet, families: 134RDX vs 164BHX). These trailers go everywhere. The 26-footer goes to places with wide gates and straight access roads, which eliminates 60% of India’s most interesting destinations.
I’ve watched buyers go from “I want the biggest” at the first showroom visit to “Thank God we went compact” after the first trip, enough times that I now start the conversation with “Where will you tow this?” before I show them a single model.
Mistake 2: Obsessing Over the Vehicle, Ignoring the Trailer
I can’t tell you how many buyers spend three months researching whether to tow with a Fortuner, a Hilux, or a Scorpio N, comparing torque curves and towing ratings and suspension setups, and then choose the trailer in a single afternoon because “the tow vehicle decision is the important one.”
It’s not. The tow vehicle pulls the trailer. The trailer is where you live. You sleep in the trailer. You cook in the trailer. You shower in the trailer. You wake up in the trailer. The tow vehicle’s job is to get the trailer to a place and then be parked. The trailer’s job is to be your home for days or weeks.
The correction: spend at least as long evaluating the trailer as you do the vehicle. Walk through it. Sit in every seat. Lie on the bed. Open every cabinet. Run the water. Check the bathroom. Use the stove. The tow vehicle matters (and we have a guide for it: How to Choose the Right Tow Vehicle), but the trailer is the product you’ll actually experience every day of the trip.
Mistake 3: Overpacking the First Trip
I have personally witnessed the following items arrive at campsites in Club Campers trailers: a portable washing machine (never used). A full-size ironing board (there is no outlet position in a trailer that makes ironing practical). A 20-inch television (the trailer has a JBL audio system and a phone mount; nobody watched the TV). A set of “premium outdoor camping cookware” purchased from Amazon the night before departure, still in the shrink wrap at the end of the trip because the trailer’s kitchen already had everything needed. A yoga mat, two dumbbells, a resistance band set, and a foam roller (the buyer’s spouse was “not going to let the trip ruin their fitness routine”; the fitness equipment occupied an entire under-bed storage compartment and was never unpacked).
The trailer comes equipped. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, climate control, lighting, storage. You add: clothes (three sets per person is enough), personal toiletries, food and cooking supplies, your specific bedding preference if the trailer’s isn’t to your taste, and entertainment (books, games, one tablet). That’s it. Everything else is weight, and weight affects towing, fuel consumption, and your cargo capacity for the things that actually matter (water and food).
The correction: pack for the first trip. Come back. Remove half of what you packed. That’s your actual packing list for every subsequent trip. The second trip is always lighter. By the fourth trip, you can pack the trailer in twenty minutes.
Mistake 4: Underestimating the Kitchen
New buyers allocate restaurant budgets to caravan trips. They eat every meal at dhabas and local restaurants because “cooking in the trailer seems like a hassle.” Then they come home having spent ₹40,000 on mediocre roadside food over a week, with indigestion, and the trailer’s kitchen unused except for making chai.
The kitchen is not a hassle. It’s a two-burner stove with a fridge and a sink. If you can make chai, you can make dal. If you can make dal, you can make a full meal. The ingredients are at every town’s market. The spices live permanently in the masala dabba that stays in the trailer. One meal cooked in the trailer (let’s say dinner: dal, rice, a simple sabzi) costs about ₹200 to ₹400 in ingredients for a family and takes 25 to 30 minutes. The same meal at a roadside restaurant costs ₹1,200 to ₹2,000 and may or may not agree with your stomach.
The correction: cook at least one meal per day in the trailer. Breakfast is the easiest entry point (omelette, poha, dosa from bought batter, paratha). Once you’ve cooked breakfast, dinner follows naturally. Eat lunch out because that’s the meal where you want to try the local food. This split (cook breakfast and dinner, eat lunch out) is the most common pattern among experienced caravan owners and it’s the best balance of cost, nutrition, and adventure. Full kitchen guide: Caravan Cooking in India.
Mistake 5: Never Taking the Second Trip
This is the one that keeps me up at night.
The first caravan trip is chaos. It is always chaos. You don’t know the hitching procedure well enough and it takes 45 minutes instead of 10. You forget to retract a stabiliser jack and it scrapes on the first speed breaker. The breaker trips because you ran the AC and the microwave simultaneously. You park on a slope and the fridge door keeps swinging open. The kids fight. The parking spot you found on Google Maps is a construction site. You arrive back home exhausted and slightly traumatised.
And some people conclude from this experience that caravanning is not for them.
They’re wrong. They’re drawing conclusions from a sample size of one, and it was the worst-possible sample: the first trip, where everything is new, nothing is routine, and every small problem feels like a disaster because you don’t yet have the context to know it’s small.
The second trip is different. The hitching takes 10 minutes because you remember the sequence. The breaker doesn’t trip because you know not to run the AC and microwave together. The parking spot works because you called ahead. The kids have claimed their bunks and are reading with headlamps by 8 pm. You cook dinner without thinking about it. You sleep well. You wake up and the mountains are there and the coffee is easy and the morning is yours.
The correction: commit to three trips before you evaluate. Not one. Three. The first trip teaches you what doesn’t work. The second trip teaches you what does. The third trip is the one where you understand what you bought and why it matters. If you don’t enjoy the third trip, the caravan genuinely isn’t for you and you should sell it (you’ll get decent resale value: Cost of Ownership Guide). But almost nobody gives up after the third trip. By then, the trailer is home.
For the detailed first-trip protocol that prevents most of the chaos: First 90 Days with Your Caravan.
The Advice I Give at the Showroom
Buy compact. Spend time inside the trailer, not just under the hood of the tow vehicle. Pack light. Cook in the kitchen. And take the second trip.
These five corrections are free. They cost nothing and they transform the ownership experience from frustrating to revelatory. Every experienced caravan owner in India arrived at these conclusions through trial and error. You can arrive at them before your first trip by reading this and believing me when I say: the first trip is not representative. The life that follows it is.
The range that first-timers end up loving: Enthusiast Range. EMI: Campers Available on EMI. Showroom in Bengaluru at Olde Bangalore Resort. Connect with us.
Kanwal is the founder of Club Campers. He has watched every first-trip mistake on this list happen at least a dozen times and still gets excited when a buyer calls after their third trip to say they understand.