The Trailer That Changed My Mind

The first time I walked inside a US-built travel trailer, I stood in the bathroom for about five minutes. Not because the bathroom was extraordinary. Because I was trying to understand how everything fit. A proper shower. A toilet that flushed. A sink with a mirror. Hot water from a real water heater. All of it inside a vehicle that could be hitched to a car and towed down a highway.

I had seen Indian “caravans” before that moment. Everyone in this space has. The conversions. A Tempo Traveller or a Tata bus with the seats ripped out and a bed bolted in. A domestic cooktop on a plywood counter. A chemical toilet behind a curtain. Fairy lights on the ceiling because someone saw a caravan on Instagram and thought the lights were the point. These conversions looked interesting in photos and fell apart in reality. The plumbing leaked. The electrical work was dodgy. The insulation was nonexistent. The gas setup was, to put it carefully, not something you’d want your family sleeping next to.

The US trailer was a different species. Not a vehicle that had been modified to sort of function as a living space. A living space that had been engineered from the ground up to exist inside a vehicle. The walls were composite laminates with insulation and vapour barriers. The electrical system had a proper breaker panel with circuits mapped and labelled. The gas system had a sealed exterior compartment, a pressure-tested line, and a flame failure device on every burner. The windows sealed. The door sealed. The roof sealed. Every joint, every fitting, every connection was there because someone had designed it to be there, tested it, and certified it against a national safety standard.

I walked out of that trailer and thought: India is building the wrong thing.

The Argument Nobody Wanted to Hear

The obvious path was to do what everyone else was doing. Convert Indian vehicles. It’s cheaper. The supply chain is domestic. You don’t deal with shipping containers, customs, or currency fluctuation. You can set up a workshop in any industrial area and start converting next month. The market was small but the entry barrier was low.

I went the opposite direction, and the reasons were not romantic.

I went with US imports because the physics don’t change at the border. A gas leak in a sealed vehicle is the same physics in Indiana as it is in India. A wall that can’t hold insulation in a Michigan winter can’t hold insulation in a Rajasthan summer. A plumbing joint that vibrates loose at 60 mph vibrates loose at 80 kmph. The problems are the same. The Americans had spent a hundred years solving them. The Indian conversion market was solving them from scratch, in workshops, without test data, without failure analysis, without safety certification.

I didn’t want to compete on the conversion. I wanted to skip the conversion entirely and bring in the finished answer.

People told me this was impractical. The trailers were too expensive. The import duties were too high. The roads were too bad. The customers didn’t exist. Nobody in India knew what a travel trailer was. Nobody would pay that kind of money for something you can’t even drive. These were all reasonable objections and, at the time, some of them were true.

The First Container

The first shipment arrived at a port. The customs process was educational. Nobody at the port had cleared a recreational vehicle before. The classification was ambiguous. Is it a vehicle? Is it a trailer? Is it a mobile structure? Is it furniture? The answer, depending on which customs officer you asked, was all of the above and none of the above. The paperwork took longer than the ocean shipping. The duties were significant. The uncertainty was worse than the duties.

When the trailers finally arrived at our facility, they needed India customisation. The US runs on 120V/60Hz. India runs on 230V/50Hz. The gas is propane in the US; it’s LPG in India. The water pressure assumptions are different. The road conditions are different. We couldn’t just unload the trailers and sell them. We had to re-engineer the electrical system, convert the gas system with proper regulators and pressure testing, tune the suspension for Indian road surfaces, and validate everything before a customer set foot inside.

This customisation process, which we now do routinely, was the part that proved the concept. Because when you convert a US-built trailer to Indian specifications, you’re working with a platform that was designed to be serviced, modified, and maintained. The wiring is accessible. The plumbing is standardised. The gas system is modular. Everything has a part number. Everything has a service manual. The trailer wants to be maintained, which is the opposite of a conversion, where every fix involves discovering what the previous builder did and trying to figure out why.

Our full customisation process: Luxury Campers, Powered for India.

The Phone Call That Changed the Business

The first few customers were who you’d expect. People who had seen RVs abroad. People who already understood the concept. Early adopters who didn’t need convincing, just a product.

But the phone call that actually changed the business came from an early buyer, a few weeks after delivery. He called to tell me, with a level of enthusiasm that I was not prepared for, that his wife had made dosa in the trailer. Not just any dosa. The best dosa. He was very specific about this. The tava heated evenly. The batter spread correctly. The kitchen counter was the right height. The ventilation worked. She had made dosa, and idli, and sambar, and coconut chutney, and filter coffee, all in the trailer’s kitchen, and declared that this was now her kitchen and the one at home was the backup.

I’m telling you this story because it redirected the entire company.

I had assumed the market was adventure. Young couples. Weekend warriors. Off-road fantasies. Instagram content. I had built the pitch around adventure because that’s what the American RV market looks like from the outside.

The market was not adventure. The market was the kitchen.

What the Market Actually Wanted

Over the next year, I watched the customer base tell me what the product was for. They weren’t listening to my pitch. They were using the trailers and showing me what mattered.

A resort owner in the south bought a trailer and parked it on his property as a premium room. No construction permits. No building timeline. Plugged it in, furnished it, and started booking it at on a per night basis the following week.

A young couple bought one and spent three months travelling. Not the adventure-sports, Instagram-reel version of travel. The quiet version. Temple towns at their own pace. Hill stations without hotel checkout times. The wife’s own kitchen, her own bathroom, her own bed, every night, in a different town.

None of these were the customers I expected. All of them were the customers the product deserved. The trailer wasn’t an adventure vehicle. It was a living space that happened to be mobile. And once I understood that, the company’s direction became clear.

The resort use case became: Resort Owner’s ROI. The retirement use case became: The Retirement Road. The farmhouse use case became: Why Your Farmhouse Needs a Caravan. The production use case became: Vanity Van vs Trailer. The site office use case became: The Site Office Solution. Each of these articles exists because a customer showed me the use case before I thought of it.

Why I Still Don’t Convert

Every few months, someone asks me why I don’t start manufacturing in India. Or at least start converting Indian vehicles alongside the imports. The margins would be higher. The price point would be lower. The market would be larger.

I don’t, and here’s why.

Forest River, the company that builds our trailers, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They produce tens of thousands of trailers a year across dozens of factories. They have decades of failure data. They know which rivet pattern holds under which vibration frequency. They know which sealant fails after four years and which one lasts twelve. They know what happens to a water heater at 10,000 feet altitude and what happens to an AC compressor after 500 hours of continuous operation at 42 degrees. That knowledge is in every trailer they ship. It’s not in the brochure. It’s in the engineering.

I cannot replicate that in a workshop in Bengaluru. Nobody can. Not because Indian manufacturing is incapable (it’s not; Indian manufacturing is extraordinary in many sectors). Because this specific knowledge, the knowledge of how a living space behaves inside a moving vehicle over years and hundreds of thousands of kilometres, takes decades of iteration to accumulate. The US RV industry has been iterating since the 1920s. The Indian caravan industry started yesterday. There’s no shortcut.

So I import. I pay the duties. I absorb the logistics complexity. I deal with the customs headaches. And I deliver a product that has a hundred years of engineering behind it, customised for India, at a price that’s higher than a conversion but in a different universe of quality, safety, and durability.

The honest comparison between what we carry and what the conversion market offers: US-Built vs. Indian Conversions. For the maintainability argument over time: Serviceability Index.

The Bet

I started Club Campers with a thesis that sounded unreasonable: Indian families would pay for a US-built travel trailer if someone showed them what it actually was. Not a photo on Instagram. Not a spec sheet. The real thing. Walk inside. Open the fridge. Flush the toilet. Turn on the stove. See the flame. Feel the insulation. Sit on the bed. Check the bathroom. Then decide.

That thesis has been tested every day for several years now. Some days it fails. Some buyers choose the cheaper conversion because the price difference is too large for their budget, and I understand that. Some buyers never get past the idea that a “caravan” is a modified van with a bed, because that’s all they’ve seen, and I understand that too.

But most days, the thesis holds. Someone walks into the showroom, walks through the trailer, and understands in about sixty seconds that this is not what they expected. The bathroom does it. Or the kitchen. Or the bed. Or the slide-out. Or the gas compartment, which I show to everyone because the engineering is visible and the safety is tangible. Something in that sixty-second walkthrough flips a switch, and the conversation changes from “what is this?” to “how soon can I have one?”

That switch is the business. Everything else, the website, the articles, the social media, the Road Trip content, is just getting people to the showroom so the trailer can do what the trailer does.

What’s Next

The Indian caravan market is still in its infancy. Most people in this country have never seen a travel trailer in person. The infrastructure (campsites, RV-ready venues, trailer-friendly parking) is being built in real time, often by our own customers on their own properties. The regulatory framework is catching up. The awareness is growing.

I don’t know what this market looks like in ten years. I know what it looks like today: a small number of people who understand what the product is, a larger number who are curious, and a very large number who have never heard of it. My job is to move people from the third group to the second group to the first group. The trailer does the rest.

If you’re in the second group, the curious one, here’s where to start: The Complete Guide to Travel Trailers & Caravans in India (2026). If you’re ready to see one in person, the showroom is in Bengaluru at Olde Bangalore Resort, Tharabanahalli. I’m usually there. Come say hello.

And if you’re the person reading this at midnight, on your phone, thinking “this sounds crazy but I want one,” I have some advice. It’s not crazy. I had the same thought, years ago, standing in a bathroom in a trailer, trying to understand how everything fit. The answer is: it fits because someone spent a hundred years figuring out how to make it fit. All you have to do is open the door.

Browse the range that this bet produced: Enthusiast Range. EMI options: Campers Available on EMI.

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Kanwal is the founder of Club Campers. He imports US-built travel trailers, converts them for Indian conditions, and takes them on the road every year to make sure they work the way he says they do.