Personal and Recreational Vehicle Owners

You are the entire approval chain. There is nobody above you to escalate to and nobody below you to delegate the phone calls to. That sounds like an advantage and mostly it is, but it means every decision that a fleet manager makes with a spreadsheet you have to make with judgement and a deadline.

The second difference is that the vehicle is discretionary right up until it is not. A cracked front cap on a travel trailer is cosmetic in March and urgent the week before a reserved site. A soft spot in a bathroom floor is a project until the day it becomes a rot excavation. Private owners consistently underestimate how fast water damage compounds, because unlike a fleet nobody is inspecting the roof on a schedule.

Third, the money is personal. A commercial operator writes off downtime and repair cost against revenue. You are spending after tax dollars on something that exists to make you happy. That changes the right advice. Where a fleet gets told to replace the panel, a private owner frequently gets told which repair is worth doing now and which one can wait a season without getting worse.

Seven pages, each written for a different constraint.

• Individual RV owners, one motorhome, usually a Class A or Class C, often the first large repair they have ever managed.
• Camper and fifth wheel owners, where the tow vehicle and the trailer are two separate problems and the hitch is a third.
• Sprinter and camper van owners, whose rig is often also the daily driver and whose build came from a converter, not a manufacturer.
• Overland and adventure travellers, whose damage happens where the pavement stopped and whose vehicle is nothing like stock.
• Vintage and classic enthusiasts, working without a parts catalogue and deciding constantly between original and functional.
• Full time RVers and snowbirds, for whom the shop schedule and the housing schedule are the same schedule.
• Weekend and family campers, working around a school calendar and a budget with a hard ceiling.

A collision estimate carries no charge. Bring the rig, or bring photographs and a claim number if it is not drivable, and we write a documented estimate against the damage.

Two evaluations are priced, because they are diagnostic work rather than a walk around. An RV systems estimate covering slide, awning, water intrusion, electrical and generator faults is $150, applied as a credit against an authorized repair. An in depth diagnostic is 1 hour at $285, also applied as a credit. Tracing an intermittent 12 volt fault or following a leak path back through a laminated wall is real technician time, and quoting it blind would be a guess at your expense.

Typical private owner work lands in predictable bands. Roof recoat and reseal runs $750 to $4,500. Slide out mechanism service runs $500 to $8,500. Water damage restoration including subfloor replacement runs $750 to $15,000. Camper collision and body work runs $750 to $50,000 depending on what the structure looks like underneath. Every one of those figures comes off the posted rate card, which also lists the labor rates the hours are billed at.

The honest answer is that it depends on a number nobody at a repair shop can see, which is what your carrier will do to your premium. What we can do is give you the repair side of the arithmetic before you call your agent.

Pay out of pocket when the repair is close to the deductible, when the damage is cosmetic and isolated, and when the cause is wear rather than an event. Sealant that failed over years is almost never a covered loss, and filing it produces a denial that still shows on your record.

File when there is structure involved, when water got behind a wall, when a third party was at fault, or when the number has a comma in it that you did not expect. Structural collision repair on a large motorhome runs $1,000 to $150,000. That is not a range anyone should absorb to protect a premium.

Bring your declarations page rather than your insurance card. The declarations page lists coverage types, limits, deductibles and whether you carry Agreed Value or actual cash value, and ten minutes with it changes what we recommend. The insurance section covers the rest.

In the shop or in our yard, depending on where it is in the process. A vehicle waiting on carrier approval sits staged with the teardown intact, so a reinspection can happen without a second disassembly. A vehicle in paint is inside. A vehicle waiting on a special order part is secured and covered.

What we ask from you is honesty about the timeline you actually have. Owners routinely say the date is flexible and then call in week two because a reservation is not flexible at all. Tell us the real date at intake and the parts get ordered in a different order.

Empty the rig of anything you need in the next month, and anything valuable, before you drop it. Personal property is your responsibility and a repair that opens a wall does not respect the contents of the cabinet on the other side of it. Take the medication, the documents and the dog bowl. Leave the bedding.