News24, Maroela Media and Tracks4Africa wrote about Kampi, South Africa's caravan and camper rental marketplace. See the coverage and the real numbers.
For five years we have told anyone who would stand still long enough that you do not need to own a caravan to go camping. You can rent one from someone who already does, parked in a driveway three suburbs over. For most of those five years, the only people saying it out loud were us. That changed this month.
On 1 June 2026, News24 ran an independent feature on Kampi under the headline "the Airbnb for caravans that is changing SA's camping world." We did not write it. We did not commission it. A travel writer, Neels van Heerden, went and looked for himself, asked two friends to poke around the site, and wrote up what they found.
The two testers could not have been more different. The first had not camped since he was a kleuter at Scottburgh in the 1980s, and remembered almost none of it. The second has been a member of a woonwaklub for years and camps most long weekends.
The beginner's first reaction was that this was not just another camping website. He landed on the same comparison the headline did: an Airbnb, but for woonwaens, boswaens en kamptoerusting. What sold him was being able to see the prices and exactly what each camper included before he committed to anything. For someone who had no idea what camping gear even costs, that was the whole game. He also liked that someone could set the camp up at his destination, which turns "I would love to but it sounds like effort" into a booking.
The veteran looked at it from the opposite end and arrived at the same place. He valued the practical filters: vehicle type, budget, licence requirements, extra equipment. And he liked that owners set their own prices and rules, because that keeps the market honest. Prices move with demand over long weekends and school holidays, the way a real marketplace should.
One a beginner, one an old hand. Both walked away describing a marketplace rather than a catalogue. That is the part we are quietly proud of.
When News24 went to print, they counted more than 360 listings, close to 3,400 bookings, and over R22 million in rental value. Here is the thing about quoting a growing platform: those figures were stale before the article was published.
As of this week, Kampi carries more than 380 live campers across all nine provinces, listed by over 260 owners. South Africans have completed more than 5,100 paid trips through the platform, worth over R31 million in camping holidays. The reviews sit at 4.88 out of 5 across nearly 1,000 verified ratings, with more than nine in ten campers leaving a full five stars. Every one of those reviews comes from a real booking with a real renter and a real owner on the other side.
We are not putting those numbers here to brag. We are putting them here because the gap between "R22 million" in the article and "R31 million" today is the most honest thing we can tell you about where this is going.
Read the coverage and a pattern shows up. None of the writers spent much ink on the caravans themselves. They spent it on the admin around the caravans: the insurance, the deposits, the verification of both the renter and the owner.
That is deliberate. A camper is a big, expensive thing to hand to a stranger, and an even bigger thing to borrow from one. Most people who hesitate to rent are not worried about the trailer. They are worried about the money and about who is on the other side of the deal. So we built the platform around exactly that: insurance on every booking, deposits held properly, and identity checks on both sides before anyone tows anything.
"The caravan is the easy part," says Kampi founder JP Voogt. "People rent through us because we handle the scary part. The money, the cover, and knowing who you are dealing with. Take that away and you just have a classifieds page with nicer photos."
The other recurring worry in the comments and the messages we get is the licence question. Plenty of South Africans do not realise their car licence will not legally let them tow a heavy caravan. We wrote the honest guide to the EB licence for exactly this, and we built a filter so you can browse only the campers you can legally tow on a Code B licence. No surprises in a parking lot at the start of your holiday.
The News24 piece arrived in the same season as a few others. Maroela Media ran an editorial on the idea of renting someone else's woonwa instead of buying your own. Tracks4Africa, who do not hand out endorsements lightly, asked whether renting an off-road trailer changes your overlanding game. And a thread on the 4x4Community forum did what no press release can: real campers asking each other whether the thing actually works.
That mix, a national news site, a travel publication, a respected overlanding authority and an unprompted forum thread, is worth more to us than any single feature. It is the difference between a brand telling you it is trustworthy and other people telling you on its behalf.
That is genuinely the best response to all of this. You no longer have to take our word for it, so do not. Go and see what is available to hire near you, or search by your dates and destination. If you are planning something bigger, start with a Kruger road trip or the Garden Route and see what fits.
And if you are reading this with a caravan sitting under a carport, earning nothing eleven months of the year, you are the other half of this story. "You should be able to try camping before you spend three hundred thousand rand on something that lives in your driveway," says Voogt. "And if you already own one, it should be paying for itself, not just depreciating." Brigitte at Brubru Caravans turned exactly that idea into a business. The honest renting-versus-buying maths is on the blog if you want to run your own numbers first.
Five years in, the press finally caught up to what more than 5,100 trips already knew. Kampi maak kamp maklik, toeganklik en lekker, of jy nou 'n beginner is en of jy al jare lank kamp. Come see why.