Spaceships vs Big Little Campers

Both run Auckland and Christchurch and nothing else, so neither can finish a trip in Queenstown, and both companies say a one-way between the two depots carries no repositioning charge — the Cook Strait fare for the vehicle is yours either way. The standard bond is NZ$5,000 at each, and each sells the excess away for NZ$35 a day (Spaceships NZ$40 if added from 1 October 2026), although Big Little holds NZ$7,500 against its largest model and charges NZ$50 a day to remove it. Both name Skippers Canyon Road, Ball Hut Road and Ninety Mile Beach as roads where damage is not covered, and Big Little adds two more on the Coromandel. On paper this is close to the same booking.

The split is certification. All three Big Little models are listed with a green warrant; Spaceships lists three of its five, the Beta 2S, Sigma and Cosmo, so the Beta and the Dream Sleeper Mini need a holiday park or a DOC site that accepts them every night. That is a legal difference about where you may spend the night, not a comfort one. Fleet-wide certification costs Big Little’s customer something in return: the booking engine enforces a seven-day minimum on every model, and a shorter search returns nothing at all. Certification does not mean the van is warm either — the heater on The Little One and The Big One is a 240-volt unit that works only at a powered site, and The Biggest One is the single Big Little model with a diesel heater and a hot shower; on the Spaceships side the Cosmo also heats on diesel.

For a trip shorter than a week the comparison does not arise. Big Little cannot be booked at all, and Spaceships is the only one of the two on the table. Past that, the arithmetic is the cost of a night rather than the cost of a day: a non-certified van commits you to a paid site every night of the trip, so weigh these two over ten or fourteen nights as a total trip cost rather than as a daily rate. The evidence behind them is uneven as well. Spaceships’ Google and Trustpilot figures land on the same 4.5, across 485 and 434 reviews respectively, while Big Little holds 5.0 from 275 Google reviews with 269 of them at Auckland and no Trustpilot profile at all when it was checked on 6 August 2026 — a higher average on a narrower base, filtered by the seven-day minimum before a single review is written.