Dan Cartwright has over 12 years of experience in the caravan and motorhome industry. He is a judge for a number of prestigious leisure vehicle awards and regularly heads off in his motorhome with his family. Every week, Dan shares his insights with the community. Here’s what he has to say this week.
The Caravan Design Awards 2025 has just revealed its winners and our very own Dan Cartwright is among the judges. He has given CaravanTimes exclusive insight into the process of deciding the models that will be triumphant and explained why the awards are a great resource for anyone looking to purchase a leisure vehicle.
How are the awards judged?
There’s a panel of six independent judges, plus one technical specialist from The Caravan and Motorhome Club, who are given the entry lists around three weeks before the Motorhome & Caravan Show. We all get assigned a particular area of interest on the caravans – mine was interior living and technology – as well as its overall specifications.
We then do what a consumer would do to research a caravan. We go onto the websites and look at the brochures, downloading information about their features, to carry out an online judging. This means rating and ranking each model, as well as looking for answers to our most pressing questions.
This is an important part of the process, because people won’t be able to look at ten or 12 caravans at the show and in an extreme amount of detail. So, we replicate the potential customer process of doing research online and one of the judges ranks the models for the availability of information.
Before the show starts, but once the halls have been set up, the judges then go and spend three days visiting each and every caravan entered for the awards. This is to ratify or change the results of our previous research in the flesh. We’re trying to emulate the process a buyer would go through when they’re looking to purchase a caravan, just in a lot more detail.
What’s the role of the technical judge?
The technical judge makes sure that all of the caravans featured meet British standard design specifications and that all of the safety features are present. Some of these are elements that can be hard to find out as a consumer, as the scrutiny for the awards goes into great detail.
Who are the awards for?
It’s the manufacturers that enter their models into different categories – size, weight, berths or family layouts – and some of them will be rewarded with awards. The real reason to go through the process, however, is to support the Club members and anybody who’s interested in buying a caravan.
Given our level of interaction with the leisure vehicles before we even start judging and the fact that we’re familiar with the makes and models of the caravans, we’re well-placed to assess them. This whole process, which takes weeks, is not practical from a consumer point of view, so we do it instead.
Even if you’ve narrowed it down to one or two categories or layouts prior to the show, a buyer wouldn’t be able to go into as much detail as we do during the event. The other thing is that dealers don’t stock every model, so anyone not visiting the show would have to travel the length and breadth of the country to see them all.
We’re not saying that you should always buy the winner of a category. After all, the specific needs of one consumer will be different to those of another purchaser, but we’re saying that the winners provide a good benchmark within the decision-making process.
Are the awards useful for people buying in the secondhand market?
What many people don’t realise is that there are hundreds of makes, models and layouts of caravans available in the secondhand market every year in the UK. With so many different variations on offer, it’s important that the information from the awards remains on the website for years to inform such choices.
Being able to see what the judges believed to be a good caravan five years ago in your layout is a good starting point for what to look for secondhand today. It really is a year-on-year resource that’s been building up for people wanting to purchase new or older models.