Spaceships vs Cruisin Motorhomes

Both price the same five cities on this site — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns and Perth — with Spaceships adding Adelaide, and both keep every vehicle on bitumen. Neither runs a 4WD and neither sells a way around the rule: Cruisin allows one exception, a well-maintained access road under twelve kilometres to a recognised campground, while Spaceships’ terms exclude dirt, closed, restricted, beach and waterway routes from cover on every insurance tier, including the top one. Both include unlimited kilometres and hand the vehicle over ready to sleep in — Spaceships with sleeping bags, pillows and sheets on every model, Cruisin with beds made up per berth, linen, doonas, bath towels and up to three drivers at no extra charge. The review records do not separate them either: Spaceships holds a 4.6-to-4.9 Google band across all eight of its Australian depots, and Cruisin a review-count-weighted 4.6 from 3,958 Google reviews with 4.8 from 1,317 on a single Australia-wide Trustpilot listing. The shapes diverge completely. Spaceships runs four converted people-movers and wagons sleeping two or four, none with room to stand up; Cruisin, family-owned in Tasmania since 1999 and priced here from the mainland rather than its Hobart home, runs eight automatic diesels from two to six berths under a published age ceiling of four years, two on the Deluxe pair.

What the vehicle contains decides most of the trip, and here it is not close. Seven of Cruisin’s eight models carry an onboard shower and cassette toilet with hot and cold water, on 85 litres of fresh water in the two-berths and 125 in the four- and six-berths; only the 2 Berth Hi Top goes without. No Spaceships model has a toilet, a shower or standing headroom at all, and its tank holds ten litres for hand-washing and drinking rather than plumbing anything. Australia has no national right to roam, so where an overnight stop is legal is set state by state and council by council with either company; what differs is the night itself and the wet afternoon. Weather narrows the gap without closing it. No vehicle in the Australian Spaceships fleet carries a heater, and its air-conditioning is front-cab only, which does nothing for the living space. Cruisin fits a living-area heater and air-conditioner to every model, but both run on 240 volts and work on a powered site and nowhere else; off-grid a 160-watt solar panel holds up the fridge and 12-volt system, a 12-volt fan is the only cooling, and a plug-in fan heater is a A$15 hire extra.

The booking form costs more over a fortnight than the daily rate does. Cruisin’s shortest hire is five days everywhere except Perth, which takes seven, and rises to ten between 26 December and 6 January and in event weeks such as the Bathurst 1000 and the Melbourne MotoGP. A one-way adds A$165 and a route minimum of ten to twenty-one days — fourteen on most routes touching Cairns, twenty-one for anything involving Perth — where Spaceships charges nothing for different pickup and return depots arranged at the time of booking, and A$200 only on a return to Adelaide. The bond behaves differently too: Cruisin debits A$5,000 to a physical credit card rather than holding it, adds a card surcharge of 2.15 or 2.18 per cent and refunds it in up to 14 working days, while Spaceships holds A$5,000 against liability of up to A$18,000 on its included tier. Buying that down is A$25 or A$35 a day at Spaceships against A$45 or A$55 at Cruisin, and the top tiers differ in kind, not degree: Spaceships still excludes negligence such as hitting a car park roof or a low branch, while at Cruisin overhead, underbody, windscreen and tyre damage sit on Maximum Cover alone and awning, water and salt damage outside every tier — the ground its one-star tail returns to.