Our Story

A few years ago we thought to ourselves “wouldn’t it be a great idea to buy an old VW campervan and go off touring”. There was only one problem with this idea. Neither of us had ever been in one. The good ones are not cheap to buy and if we went ahead and bought one and found out that we really didn’t like it after all that could be a very expensive mistake.

No problem we thought. Let’s just hire one and then we can decide. It must however have already been June, ie well into the season, and try as we might we couldn’t find any availability for love nor money. Eventually we compromised and hired a brand new one from a company in Nottingham. We had a great week at Hillend Campsite on the Gower peninsula and decided that we loved the campervan life. The week in Wales really tested our resolve as towards the end of it a storm blew in and totally destroyed our gazebo. This was added to a growing pile of broken gazebos that were clearly not built for the rigours of the Welsh weather.

So we got home and decided to buy a campervan and rent it out when we weren’t using it which would be most of the time. The idea was that renting the campervan would help pay for its maintenance and upkeep which for vintage vans we figured could be costly. If nobody wanted to rent it then we still had a vw campervan for our own use and which we figured would retain its value.

That winter after a couple of abortive purchase attempts (people think their own vans are worth a lot more than they really are) we eventually found one in great Yarmouth that suited our purpose and campervan Betty became ours. The rest, as they say, is history.

We built our website and came up with the name Anne’s Vans (after toying with all sorts of names like Lincoln campervan hire, Lincolnshire VW campervan rentals and so on). Campervan Betty became very popular so we decided to buy another, Bertie and the stable expanded. During 2020 we saw that we were having to turn away bookings due to the two vans being in constant demand so in the Autumn of 2020 we extended the fleet to a third van with the acquisition of Ruby.

Our Team

Although Anne is the boss and star of the show she has a supporting cast of two others. Namely her husband Tref who does a lot of the admin and mechanic Dave who most of you will meet during the van handover.

anne with van
Tref (left) and Dave (right) stood next to campervan Bertie