What Renting Motorhomes Taught Me About Building a Travel Business

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What Renting Out Motorhomes Taught Me About Building a Travel Business From Scratch

When I started LSR365 during the pandemic, I didn’t have a big investor behind me or a fleet of shiny new vehicles. I had one motorhome I’d converted myself, a website I built on evenings and weekends, and a bet that people would want a different kind of holiday once travel opened back up again. A few years later, we run a mixed fleet of owned and partner vehicles out of Alicante, Spain — and the lessons from those early days still shape how I run things.

Start with the product you can actually deliver

I didn’t launch with ten vehicles and a marketing budget. I launched with one motorhome I’d built with my own hands, because that’s what I could control end to end — the quality, the presentation, the little details that make a rental feel personal rather than transactional. Scaling came later, once the first version actually worked.

Most of your customers won’t be experts — design for that

Roughly 90% of the people who rent from us have never driven a motorhome before. That completely changes what “good service” means. It’s not just about handing over the keys; it’s about walking someone through water tanks, gas systems and parking a much bigger vehicle than they’re used to, in a way that doesn’t scare them off before the trip even starts. If your product has a learning curve, the business that wins isn’t the one with the most features — it’s the one that makes the learning curve disappear.

Location decisions compound over time

We picked pickup points near Alicante-Elche airport and in San Pedro del Pinatar for practical reasons — proximity to where our customers actually land. That single decision has quietly shaped almost everything else, down to which vehicles we keep in the catalog at any given time. Small early decisions about where you operate tend to have a much longer tail than they seem to at the time.

A mixed fleet model can work better than owning everything

Rather than sinking all our capital into buying vehicles outright, we built partnerships with independent motorhome owners who list their vehicles through us. It spreads risk, lets the fleet grow faster than our own capital would allow, and — done right — gives owners a way to earn from a vehicle that would otherwise sit unused most of the year.

Building it yourself teaches you what actually matters

Handling the website, the SEO, the content and the translations myself wasn’t the most efficient use of my time on paper. But it meant I understood exactly what a customer sees and feels at every step, long before I ever thought about outsourcing any of it. That firsthand understanding is something you can’t fully delegate away, even once the business grows.