Cheap campervan hire Australia: the five things that set the price

The single largest lever is the class you book, and in Australia the classes are defined by what is inside the van rather than how old it is. A two-berth with an esky and a portable cooker sits at the bottom of the range. A two-berth with a compressor fridge, a sink and a 300W solar panel sits a tier above it, even though both sleep the same number of people.

If your only requirement is a bed, book the bottom class and put the savings into fuel. the Budget Mini Camper and the Mystery Machine 2 are the two cheapest ways into a proper sleeping vehicle, and neither needs a powered site to run.

Australian campervan pricing is driven by the school holiday calendar more than by weather. The last two weeks of December, the January school holidays, Easter and the September-October break in New South Wales all push rates up hard. Outside those windows, even in the middle of summer, prices fall.

The counter-intuitive part is that shoulder seasons are cheap in places people assume are impossible. May in Queensland is dry, warm and quiet. March in Tasmania is stable and half the price of January. If your dates are flexible at all, moving a week either side of a school holiday does more for the price than any promo code.

A one-way hire costs more than a return hire on the same dates, because the operator has to move the vehicle back or wait for someone to take it the other way. The fee varies enormously by route: Brisbane to Cairns is a busy corridor and often cheap, while Perth to Broome carries a real repositioning cost.

Relocations are the exception. When a van has to move between depots on a deadline, operators sell it cheap — sometimes for a dollar a day plus fuel. These appear without warning and disappear in hours, which is why the practical advice is to check the specials page regularly rather than to plan around them.

Some cheap rates are cheap because the kilometres are capped. A capped rate looks great until you drive 4,000km and pay for the excess. On a two-week east coast trip, unlimited kilometres is usually worth paying for up front.

Read the inclusions line by line. Unlimited kilometres, a reasonable bond, and no compulsory extras bundled in are the three things that separate a genuinely cheap hire from a headline rate with a sting.

The same van class costs different amounts in different cities, because demand and fleet size differ. Cairns, Broome and Darwin in peak season are the most expensive markets in the country. Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth are usually softer.

If you are flexible about where you start, picking up in a softer market and driving toward the busy one is almost always cheaper than the reverse. It is also the direction the vehicles need to move anyway.

Cheap does not mean old, unsafe or unroadworthy. Australian rental fleets are regulated and vehicles are replaced on schedule. What you are trading away at the bottom of the range is comfort, not safety: an esky instead of a fridge, a portable cooker instead of a kitchenette, a roof tent instead of a bed inside.

Knowing which of those you can live without is the whole game. Two people who eat out and sleep early will be perfectly happy in the cheapest van. Two people who cook every night and travel in the tropics will hate it by day four and should have spent the extra twenty dollars a day.