caravan versus house m.m.m.m.m!

[heathercobbett]

A friend of ours has bought a caravan on the south coast and the rental is £650 a week! (then they have to pay £50 per person to use the pool etc)

I had no idea they were so expensive.And to top it all,when he went down last week,it had not been cleaned properly and the shower head was coming off AND they knew he was coming

So my bargain recommendation is a Florida villa!

[chrisj]

I agree, the rental prices in England are very high, saying that you have to think about the
prices of flights, car, park tickets etc if you go to Florida.

I would always opt for Florida myself, but take into account the costs, some people might
not be able to stretch to it.

[Phil and Mel]

We faced a similar situation this year. After our two weeks in a gorgeous 3 bed villa on Four Corners, (£495 per week) we were then back at work for a week then away again for a week in a caravan in Scotland (£500+). It astounded me when I realised, as we sat in our claustrophobic little (although "Gold" standard) caravan!!

Don't care about the extra cost for flights etc. give me Florida every time [msnwink]

The great thing about going to Florida is there is something for most budgets, we used to have a caravan in North Wales but we sold it last year because the ground rent was going up at a rate of 25% per year, it was daylight robbery, we only rented out occasionally because it got so messed up so we put it on the market and sold in in 4 hours!!!

[heathercobbett]

But why are caravans so expensive to hire? Do they not last long?

Our friends cost around £20000 to buy and his running expenses are not high(they will be even lower if the site owners dont do repairs!)

And thats another big difference;in Florida our manco repairs ,replaces at the drop of a hat! Does keep things in tip-top condition but a bit surprising in a new house

Glad to see you are converts and hope you enjoy many more Florida holidays

[Ray&Sarah]

A few years ago we looked into going to stay in a Caravan on a site in France, it actually worked out more expensive than a package deal to Florida, guess which we opted for![msnsmile2]

[kaysvacationvilla]

What are you referring to as a Caravan? The only thing I can think of is a Dodge Caravan mini van.

[rainyday]

A caravan is like a mobile home on wheels. I think they're called trailers in the US (like the big ones you see on movie sets but much smaller - they typically accommodate 4-8 people.

[fiona]

We used to go camping with Keycamp to France every year while the children were tots, I say camping, it was a huge mobile home with fridge/freezer, bath & loo etc so hardly roughing it! I used to get home and wonder how we had lived in something the size of our kitchen! We all used to have a wonderful time, and then one year we took them to Florida! Well, walking into a villa was like walking into a palace, and our own pool, all that - and Disney too, I think they thought they had died and gone to heaven. The next year we went to Spain and stayed in a villa, cost us more for 2 weeks than 3 weeks in Florida did, and the villa was disgusting and none of it was an experience we enjoyed. I did fondly look back at the keycamp hols and look at doing the same a couple of years ago, was staggered to find it more expensive that going to florida! So 2 guesses where we have been going since then!

[suegooding]

We have come back recently from a caravan (mobile home) holiday. It cost us the earth. I am in a wheelchair so we had no choice of grade caravan as the only suitable ones were the gold grades. It cost £850 for the week and that was with a discount.

When in future people think our villa is exspencive to rent I might just drop it into the conversation how costly it is to rent a caravan. I definitely wounldn't swap our villa for a caravan especially as we had sleepless nights because of it being under an apple tree with apples crashing down all night long.

So cheers to our villa, long may it stand in the awful weather, so far so good, no damage.