While renting their RV with RVshare, Doug and Becky Dempsey have learned a lot about building relationships with their renters and staying open-minded. When you rent out your trailer, it helps to know what your renter needs and where they are heading, enabling you to share any information or supplies relevant to their situation. For example, one family shared that they were going on a fishing trip and the Dempseys supplied the poles and tackle since they already had them on hand – simple as that!
The same goes for renters, being open and honest about your travels not only allows the owner to offer advice (and perhaps some fishing poles), but it creates trust between the two parties. Here the Dempseys share a few more tips on making the rental process as easy as possible.
How far have your renters come to rent your trailer?
Becky: People who have traveled the farthest to rent the RV came from Detroit. They were going to a family reunion about 20 miles from here, and they rented our RV; we delivered it to them so it was convenient. Everybody else that has rented it is pretty much local, within the northeast Ohio-Cleveland area. They’ve taken it, I think the farthest was the Indy 500; we also had people take it to Cooksport in Pennsylvania. We had people take it to their private property they have down in mid-Ohio, around the Columbus area; we had people taking it to Mohican.
What is it that makes you comfortable with allowing a renter to trailer your camper?
Doug: We’ve had renters that have taken this travel trailer to the Daytona 500, which we thought was a wonderful idea and we were excited to help them do that. We’ve had renters take this travel trailer to a state park where there was a jamboree of music, and we were definitely okay with that. We’ve had other renters use our travel trailer for a dog show. Instead of trying to find a hotel that was pet-friendly or miles away, they were able to rent our travel trailer, set it up right where the dog show was gonna be and we were okay, as we are pet-friendly. As a travel trailer owner and user of RVshare, one of the things we really respect and want is just honesty. Tell us what your trip is all about. Tell us who’s gonna go with you, where you’re going, what you plan on doing. We don’t ask too many details, but we just ask that you be honest with us. Tell us what you’re going to do and that makes us excited for it, too, and we can also add supplies that might make your trip better. For example, a local family just wanted to go fishing for the weekend. I provided fishing poles, fishing tackle, so all they had to do was show up, fish, have a good time and then go home.
Any other tips you can offer potential renters?
Becky: The biggest tip that I could give a renter is just to go into it with an open mind and know that you’re gonna have a good experience. If you keep your communication open with the owners of the RV [and] you treat the RV with respect, like you would as if it was your own property, and you know that a great adventure is gonna take place, then you’ll have an awesome experience.
How do you build relationships with your renters?
Becky: We stay in contact with our renters [through] a journal. We just bought a little notebook from Target and ask people to tell us [their] story. You see it a lot in bed and breakfasts. In the room, there will be a little journal and [the BnB] will say: date it, write a note to the owner. We thought, what a great opportunity for us to do that in our RV, then we can always go back and look to see what people had to say about it, if there were suggestions or things we could do better or things they really enjoyed and loved. So we got our book, and all of our renters have left us little notes. We even had some people leave us postcards from where they went, things like that.
I also try to connect with all of our renters on social media, because it’s nice to be able to reach out to them if we have something coming up and I’m planning in the spring to send an email to who have already rented from us and just say, “Hey, we’re gearing up for the season. Since you’ve rented from us in the past, are there any specific dates [you’d like to reserve]?” and just give them the head’s up before the masses come around, especially for people we have a really good relationship with. I have to say, everybody we’ve rented to, Doug and I are like, “We could totally be friends with those people.” Everyone’s been wonderful. It’s just really been a great experience.
