A practical SA host guide to maintaining, safety-checking and inventorying your camper before every rental, so it comes home with a five star review.
Your camper earns money on a weekend when you are not in it. Someone you have never met hitches it up, tows it down a dirt road to Kgalagadi or the Cederberg, and trusts that everything on it works. That trust is the whole product. When it holds, you get a five star review and a repeat booking. When it breaks, it breaks in the worst possible place: 200km from the nearest town, with a family standing next to a trailer that will not behave.
We have run over 5,800 completed trips on Kampi. The ones that go wrong almost never go wrong because of bad luck. They go wrong because something was loose, worn or missing before the trailer left the yard, and nobody put their hands on it. This guide is that check. It is for hosts who want their camper home in one piece and their reviews clean.
"Prepare your camper for the worst night of someone else's trip, not the best one. That is the night your maintenance gets tested." - JP, Kampi founder
Before every handover, do a slow lap of the trailer. Not a glance. A proper ten minute walk-around where you put your hands on things. Most of what fails on a trip is visible to someone who is actually looking.
This is the part that, if it lets go, ends a trip and possibly a lot more. Check that the coupling locks down snug over the tow ball and that the mounting bolts are tight. Tighten the tow bar and tow ball bolts to your manufacturer's torque spec and re-check them before each trip, because vibration on corrugated roads works fasteners loose over time. Arrive Alive gives a simple field test: once hitched, try to lift the trailer off the ball by hand. You should not be able to.
Your safety chains should cross under the drawbar, so that if the coupling ever fails the drawbar is caught instead of digging into the tar. The chains should be rated to the trailer's gross weight. Match your coupling to the tow ball size as well. The common standard in South Africa is a 50mm ball, but check yours rather than assuming. While you are thinking about towing, make sure your renters are licensed for the weight: our EB licence guide covers when a trailer needs more than a Code B.
South African law sets the minimum tread depth at 1mm, visible across the full width and around the whole tyre. That is the legal floor, not a target. Most tyres carry wear indicators set at 1.6mm, and replacing at that mark gives you a real safety margin. On a loaded trailer heading onto gravel, worn tyres are the difference between a controlled stop and a slide.
Tread is only half the story. Trailer tyres usually have plenty of tread because the trailer spends most of its life parked, and that parked life is exactly the problem. Tyres age from sun, heat and standing still, not just from kilometres. Manufacturers generally recommend replacing caravan and trailer tyres at around six years, and at eight years at the latest, regardless of how much tread is left. You can read the age off the sidewall: find the DOT code and read the last four digits. "2219" means the tyre was made in week 22 of 2019. A trailer with deep tread on ten year old tyres is not safe, it just looks safe.
A door that swings open while the trailer is moving is not a cosmetic problem. It can throw gear onto the road and damage the door itself. Check that every door, hatch and locker latches firmly and that the hinges are solid, not loose or cracked. Open and close each one. Do the same with canvas zips: a stripped zip on a rear cabinet means cargo can work its way out on a rough road. Fix the small ones before they become the reason someone loses a camp chair on the way to Augrabies.
Walk to the back with the trailer plugged in and confirm the brake lights, indicators, tail lights and number plate light all work. These are legally required to function. Trailers in South Africa run either a 7-pin plug for basic lighting or a 13-pin plug that adds functions like a reverse light and a permanent live feed for caravan fridges. Whichever you have, the pins corrode, so check rather than trust.
Wheel bearings are the quiet killer. A seized bearing cannot be fixed in the bush, and it strands the trip. Best practice is to clean, inspect and re-grease the bearings with new seals once a year, and to re-grease after any water crossing. When you check them, look at the grease: good bearing grease is never black. Black or rusty grease means the bearing is damaged and needs replacing, not topping up. If you would rather have it done properly, our list of caravan service centres across South Africa is a good place to start.
One of the most common and most avoidable failures is a fridge or kitchen unit that was packed rather than fastened. On a smooth tar road it is fine. On a corrugated gravel road it bounces, and a bouncing fridge tears its drawer off the rail, snaps cable ties and damages everything around it. The fault then gets blamed on "the fridge", when the real fault was that nothing was holding it down.
The rule is simple. Heavy units get bolted, not strapped. Bolt the kitchen unit through the floor and bolt the fridge slide down properly. Use a ratchet strap as a backup on top, never as the only thing holding a heavy item. Storage crates and ammo boxes need working clips and a strap across them, because a crate that pops open on a climb empties itself into the rest of the trailer. None of this is expensive. Four M6 bolts and one decent ratchet strap prevent the kind of secondary damage that turns a small trip into a repair bill.
"A loose fridge does not just break the fridge. It breaks the drawer, the rail, and the trust of the family it lands on. Bolt it down." - JP, Kampi founder
Three systems generate most of the messages a host gets mid-trip: water, gas and power. Two of them are usually misunderstood rather than broken, and one of them genuinely ruins trips when it fails.
The one that genuinely ruins trips is the water tank. A hairline crack on a tank or its mounting bracket leaks slowly, soaks into stored clothing and bedding, and a family arrives at camp with everything wet. Before a trip, fill the tank, look underneath for drips, and check the mounting is solid. Aluminium tanks crack with age and vibration. If yours has a history, a plastic tank with proper plumbing fittings is a cheap and reliable replacement.
Any LP gas installation in a camper needs a Certificate of Conformity under SANS 10087, and that certificate can only be issued by an authorised installer registered with SAQCC Gas. It is not a nice-to-have. If you rent out a unit with a gas installation, get it certified and keep the certificate. It protects the renter, it protects you, and it is the law.
Most "the solar is broken" messages are not a fault at all. They are a flat battery from normal use on a cloudy day with the lights left on. It helps to understand the maths and to explain it to your renters. As an illustration: a 12V fridge might draw around 40Ah a day. A 100Ah lead-acid battery only gives you about 50Ah of usable capacity before you are doing it harm, so that is roughly one day of fridge with no top-up. A 150W solar panel in good South African sun can put back around 60Ah in a day, which covers the fridge with margin. The numbers vary with your fridge, your battery and the weather, but the point holds: if the sun does not shine and nobody manages the load, the battery goes flat, and that is physics, not a defect. Test your charger and solar controller before each trip so you know the hardware is sound, then teach renters how to use it. Our guide to solar, batteries and fridges is worth sending to every renter.
When a chair goes missing or a drawer comes back damaged, "I am pretty sure it was there" is not a record. Dated photos are. Build a written inventory of what is in the camper and take clear, dated photos at handover, including the inside of lockers and the number of camp chairs. Have the renter confirm the list before they drive off.
This does two things. It settles the small disputes before they start, because both sides agreed what was there. And if you ever need to claim against a deposit, a dated handover photo is the evidence that wins it. A vague memory is the evidence that loses it. Spend the five minutes. If you want to see the trip from the renter's side too, our 4x4 camper trip checklist shows what a well-prepared renter is packing and checking.
Everything above works far better when it is written down. A camper with a service history earns more, gets better reviews, and wins the disputes that an undocumented one loses. When a renter claims a fault, a dated record showing the part was checked and working before the trip is the difference between a fair conversation and a he-said-she-said.
This is why we sell a Kampi maintenance and service booklet in the Kampi store. One place to log every service, every pre-trip check and every handover inventory, so the history travels with the camper instead of living in your head. Pair it with your Listing Health Score, which already gives well-managed listings better visibility in search. A maintained camper is safer, and it also ranks higher and books more.
"The hosts who keep records are the hosts who keep their five star ratings. It is not a coincidence." - JP, Kampi founder
If you do nothing else before a handover, do these five things. Walk around the trailer and put your hands on the coupling, bolts and tyres. Bolt down anything heavy. Fill the water tank and look for leaks. Test the power and explain it to your renter. Take dated photos of everything in the camper and have the renter sign off the inventory. Write it all in the book.
None of this is glamorous, and none of it takes long. It is the difference between a camper that comes home with a good review and one that comes home on a recovery truck. Setting up an unfamiliar trailer in the dark is how renters' relationships get tested, so do not let a loose bolt do the same to your business.
Ready to get your camper earning, properly prepared? Improve your Listing Health Score, grab a service booklet from the Kampi store, and send your next renter our departure checklist so you are both ready before the trip starts.