The Caravan Industry Over The Last Fifty Years

Throughout the UK the holiday industry relies on Caravans as many of the Holiday parks feature a large selection of new caravans on offer for holiday makers visiting the area. This has been the case since the 1950's and 60's where caravan holidays in the UK became extremely popular. This allowed an entirely new market to appear that meant the sales of caravans across the United Kingdom; this market grew fairly quickly from both private and public sales to private owners and large holiday parks across the country. The popularity of caravans was not expected when the caravan first appeared, but the late 50's and 60's were a time of big music concerts and beach holidays being very popular with people all over the UK.

Bands like the Beatles and big beach resorts such as Blackpool meant lots of people travelled to these events and areas and these people needed somewhere to stay. At the big concerts many people used tents to stay in across the field that the concert was being held at. But the other major accommodation that people would have to stay in were caravans and VW campers, the fans that came to see the bands would either have to stay at nearby caravan parks and make the trip to the concert or take their own private caravan to the site. This meant all the while caravan companies were taking in big profits due to the large increase in sales.

In today's market the new caravan business is still big but has declined since the early years of mass concerts and beach holidays. This can be down to the weather in the UK in the summer since the turn of the century has changed for the worse. Also the increase in low cost air travel and the internet mean that many of the UK's tourists will travel to mainland Europe to go on holiday with countries such as France and Spain being tourist hot spots in recent years.

This is down to the better weather and a different culture. Another example for the change is that society has changed in the UK since the 60's and 70's. The traditional English beach holiday has been in decline due to more people travelling abroad and beach holiday resorts decreasing in quality. Also with new technology being released many people consider the caravan holiday as 'boring' and choose not to go in the great outdoors, this new technology is gadgets such as the Xbox 360 which makes teenagers and young people to want to stay indoors and play rather than go on an outdoors holiday and go hiking and biking for example.

The new caravan market has been helped considerably by the caravan transport business as well as these two go hand in hand. Without either of these businesses operating then both markets would not be able to survive. This is because the new caravans would not be able to be transported to the caravan sites throughout the country without the caravan transport business.

Overall the new caravan business has changed since its early days and has turned a corner with the business being valued differently on the market in the UK. With more new technologies being made the new caravan business is being forced to enter new sectors of the market other than the holiday business to gain the profit they need. Overall while the last twenty years have not been completely fair to the caravans industry, as economic malaise becomes a reality, the cheaper holidays offered by caravanning companies will undoubtedly become more popular.