By William Coleman
It may be no surprise that the October NEC Caravan and Motorhome show brings tens of millions of pounds to the UK leisure industry. The show is a hotbed of purchases, holiday bookings, down payments and deposits on holiday homes and leisure vehicles. The Swift Group have announced that last week’s show was a swooping success for their sales figures.
2017 was a bumper year for caravan and motorhome purchases but it seemed to take a slight slump in early 2018 with a lot of dealers and manufacturers having older stock left to shift. This may have been an inevitability due to the amount of new caravans and motorhomes that were recently purchased. Now it seems like the winds of change are upon us and the sales numbers are starting sore once again.
Swift took the initiative and had quite the display at the NEC. Not only did they have a full line up of holiday homes, caravan and motorhomes, they also had their best package of event deals and offers. Early figures suggest that the company’s show success has captured a notable market share.
Nick Page, Swift Commercial Director, said: “We are thrilled by the results of the Motorhome & Caravan Show, where sales have exceeded expectations even though we have been running our event offers since September.
“In addition to recent triumphs at exhibitions across Europe and Scandinavia, this outcome has
reinforced our commercial confidence. We are therefore delighted to announce that we will be
resuming 5-day production weeks immediately after our annual shutdown in early November, while also increasing production volume of touring caravans.
“It also demonstrates that, despite uncertainty surrounding the impact of ‘the Brexit affect’, the
company continues to go from strength to strength with well-founded optimism for the coming year. We are pleased to share this positive trajectory with both our dealer network and the wider industry.”
Another tool used by Swift at the Caravan and Motorhome show was the launch of their all new leisure vehicle finance and insurance initiatives, Swift Advance and Supersure Insurance, which we will cover in detail in the next few days. These 2 new products would have certainly been a contributing factor to the high sales numbers.
The top performing Swift models at the show were the all-new Elegance Grande and Eccles 100th anniversary edition touring caravans, while the 2019 Elegance Grande 655 received significant attention thanks to its novel layout, including a pull-down bed.
Swift motorhome sales saw the brand new 2019 Escape Compact fare well alongside the Swift Select panel van range, with their nimble, versatile offering appealing to a wide range of visitors and securing a number of hire fleet orders. As always the top notch Kon-Tiki dominated the motorhome sales.
Aside from the their touring homes Swift also saw success with their holiday home range. With the rise in popularity of the static caravans Swift secured brand new orders for the innovative S-Pod 6, whose clever layout and mezzanine level proved immensely popular.
