Leisure vehicles Europe

The European umbrella organisation for all country representatives of the leisure vehicle industry, the European Caravan Federation (ECF), collects market data on the sales of caravans and motor caravans.

New registration figures for the European leisure vehicle market are published on a quarterly basis on its homepage www.e-c-f.com.

In 2011, the European leisure vehicle market surpassed the previous year’s result (150,500 units) by 3.4 percent with 155,650 new registrations. However, compared to the years before the global fi nancial crisis, this figure still represents a loss of more than 50,000 vehicles.

Since 2007, some of the the main sales markets, such as the UK (– 36.1 percent), France (– 16.7 percent), Italy (– 50.9 percent) and the Netherlands (– 36.5 percent), lost up to half of their market volume. Only Germany (+ 1 percent) and Switzerland (+ 37.9 percent) were able to hold steady or even improve on 2007 levels on account of very good sales volumes in 2011.

A quarterly examination of the year 2011 paints a varied picture. While the first and second quarters of 2011 experienced an increase in registrations of 1.7 percent and 7 percent respectively, new registrations during the third quarter of 2011 declined slightly (– 0.3 percent). During the fourth quarter of 2011, sales of leisure vehicles increased again by 2.3 percent as compared to the previous year’s period. Accordingly, the first half year of 2011 shows growth of 5 percent while the second half of the year increased slightly by 0.7 percent.

The way in which information on leisure vehicles is collected can vary significantly among EU states. Therefore it is very difficult to compare the number of vehicles in use for the various countries.

According to information gathered by the ECF, a total of 5.46 million leisure vehicles were in use in Europe on 1 January 2012.