What Trustpilot reviews say
Trustpilot scores for all eleven campervan rental companies in New Zealand, read page by page — the recurring praise, the complaint clusters, and which listings belong to a different country's business entirely.
Trustpilot is the smallest of the review platforms we read for New Zealand and the least flattering. Almost nobody writes a Trustpilot review at the depot counter; they write one at home, after the final invoice has landed. That selection bias is not a flaw to correct for — it is the reason the platform is worth reading. It is the best place to find out what happens when a rental goes wrong, which is the part of a rental company you cannot judge from its website.
It also means a Trustpilot score should never be read as "how good is this company". Read next to the same company's Google rating, it answers a narrower and more useful question: how far apart are the people who just handed the keys back and the people who have since had an argument about the bill.
Three things decide how much weight a score on this page deserves.
How to read this page
Which page the score belongs to
Several of these brands trade in more than one country, and Trustpilot lists businesses by domain, not by brand. Apollo is the trap:
apollorv.com— rated 1.7, and it is the United States business.apollocamper.com— rated 4.1, and it is the company that rents campervans in New Zealand.
Same name, different operation, more than two stars apart. Every score below names the exact listing it came from, and says whether that listing is New Zealand-only or an Australia and New Zealand combined page.
The review count, before the score
Britz sits at 3.3 on six reviews and Wilderness at 4.8 on 186. Those are not comparable numbers, and the smaller one is not really a rating at all. Where a sample is too thin to stand on its own we say so rather than ranking it anyway.
Whether the company answers its critics
Trustpilot publishes the share of negative reviews a business has replied to, and it separates these companies more cleanly than the scores do — from 22% at one end to 100% at the other. It is not a measure of whether problems get fixed, but it is a measure of whether they get acknowledged.
Scores, distributions and reply rates below were read from the live Trustpilot pages on 5 August 2026, and are quoted with the review counts they came from. Sections are ordered by score, and the reviews themselves are summarised for recurring patterns rather than quoted — one furious review is noise, the same complaint thirty times is a fact.
from 186 reviews
wilderness.co.nz, a New Zealand-only listing.
- 87% are 5-star and 4% are 1-star.
- Replies to 100% of negative reviews.
The highest score in the market, and the review text is unusually consistent about why.
What renters like
Two things come up again and again:
- The vehicles. German-built, and newer than anything else here.
- The handover. Reviewers describe a proper briefing rather than a set of keys and a leaflet.
The layout and fit-out of specific models get singled out often enough on top of that to look like a deliberate product decision rather than luck.
What renters flag
Complaints are genuinely scarce. The ones that exist are old and small — a pre-existing dent, a minor leak — and several of them still carry four stars, which tells you the reviewer thought the problem was handled.
Read the score with its business model attached
Wilderness is the premium operator with the smallest fleet and only two depots, so its reviews come from people who chose to pay more and got what they paid for. That is a real result, but it is not measuring the same customer as a budget brand's 2.2.
from 434 reviews
www.spaceshipsrentals.co.nz, the New Zealand listing, which is separate from the Australian and UK/Europe Spaceships pages.
- 68% are 5-star and 5% are 1-star.
The strongest combination of score and sample size on this page: it is the only company here rated above 4.4 with more than two hundred reviews behind it.
What renters like
- Support, rather than luxury. Reviewers describe getting hold of a person quickly, often over messaging, and getting a useful answer.
- Vans that arrive stocked. The camping gear, kitchen kit and bedding needed to actually use the vehicle are supplied rather than sold as extras.
What renters flag
The negatives are small and consistent with a compact, older fleet.
- Missing minor items, turning up repeatedly — a lighter, a tool, a hose.
- Occasional flat batteries.
- Vans that look their age. Several reviewers volunteer this while noting they had no mechanical trouble across both islands, which is about the fairest summary of this fleet available.
The 5% 1-star tail is what it looks like: a small number of trips where several faults landed on one vehicle and the resolution became a dispute. Worth knowing, but it is a tail, not the shape of the page.
from 381 reviews
maui-rentals.com, an Australia and New Zealand combined listing.
- 58% are 5-star and 13% are 1-star.
- Replies to 66% of negative reviews.
Reviews of the premium thl brand read like reviews of a well-run logistics operation.
What renters like
- Efficient pickup and drop-off at the large depots.
- Staff who know the vehicle.
- Motorhomes that arrive clean and presented.
- The fleet-age policy, which shows up indirectly: very few reviewers complain about a tired vehicle, which is not true of most of this page.
What renters flag
One complaint recurs rather than appearing once: water getting in during heavy rain, around window seals or roof fittings, occasionally onto a bed. It is a minority of reviews and it is the specific thing to check on handover, in a country where a week of rain on the West Coast is a normal outcome rather than bad luck.
The listing is combined, so a share of this is Australian
Some of both the praise and the complaints describes Australian depots. Treat the score as evidence about the brand's operating standard rather than about a particular New Zealand branch.
from 252 reviews
www.apollocamper.com, an Australia and New Zealand combined listing.
- 56% are 5-star and 13% are 1-star.
- Replies to 79% of negative reviews.
Check the domain before you use an Apollo rating for anything
There are three listings, and the one that ranks well in search is not the New Zealand business:
www.apollocamper.com— 4.1 from 252 reviews. The company that rents campervans in New Zealand, and the listing this section is about.apollorv.com— rated 1.7 from 67 reviews. The United States business, and the page a search returns first.apollocamper.co.nz— unclaimed, a single review.
The number that describes the operation you would actually book is the first, and it is a fundamentally different picture from the one a casual search produces.
What renters like
On the correct listing, the positives cluster on the depot.
- The handover walkthrough, which gets specific praise.
- Named staff, mentioned often enough to suggest the induction is a real process.
- The vehicle on long routes. Reviewers taking long independent routes tend to rate it well.
What renters flag
Two negative patterns are worth carrying into a booking.
- Kit missing at handover. Reviewers describe buying basics for themselves in the first days.
- Appliance faults appearing on the road, rather than mechanical ones: three-way fridges needing a reset, solar controllers, drawer catches, awnings.
A related and more troubling thread is faults reported at drop-off that reviewers doubt were ever written down, which is the mechanism by which the same problem reaches the next renter.
Roughly a quarter of this listing is New Zealand
That share of the reviews traces to the three New Zealand depots, so the sample is real but it is not predominantly local.
from 39 reviews
wendekreisen.co.nz, a New Zealand-only operator with no Australian listing to combine with.
- 56% are 5-star and 28% are 1-star.
- Replies to 100% of negative reviews.
This is the most misleading average on the page
The distribution is the reason to read it. 4.1 normally suggests "generally fine". Here it is more than half delighted customers and better than a quarter one-star ones, with almost nothing in the middle — an average that very few individual renters actually experienced.
What renters like
The delighted half are consistent about what they liked.
- Communication, prompt and detailed before the trip.
- Vans built and serviced in-house rather than bought in.
- Pricing they found transparent, with road user charges included rather than added at the end. That last one is specific and checkable, which is more than most pricing praise amounts to.
What renters flag
The one-star quarter is equally consistent.
- Electrical and heating faults.
- Support that talked reviewers through diagnosing the problem themselves over several days, instead of swapping the vehicle.
For a shoulder-season or winter trip that is the failure mode to weigh, because a heater fault is trip-defining in a way a broken drawer is not.
Thirty-nine reviews is a small base
A handful of bad months would move this number a long way, in either direction.
from six reviews
britz.co.nz, scoped to the New Zealand domain and distinct from the global britz.com page.
Six reviews is not a rating
It is six anecdotes with an average printed on top, and no conclusion about a company running three depots should rest on it. We list it because leaving it out would be its own kind of dishonesty, not because it tells you much.
For what it is worth, the reviews are spread across several years and split:
- The better ones praise the vehicle itself and an efficient drop-off, including one reviewer noting they were not charged for a breakage.
- The worse ones describe a long wait at pickup, a vehicle that was not ready, and difficulty getting a reply afterwards.
Britz is far better evidenced elsewhere
Its two largest New Zealand depot listings on Google carry over a thousand reviews each and both sit at 4.2, and those figures are on its company profile. Use those, and treat this page as a footnote.
from 135 reviews
campervanvillage.com, an Australia and New Zealand combined listing.
- 37% are 5-star and 34% are 1-star.
- Replies to 65% of negative reviews.
Another heavily polarised distribution: nearly three-quarters of all reviews land at five stars or one star, with 6% in the middle at three. The shape is familiar from JUCY's page further down — nobody has a mediocre rental.
What renters like
The positive third is about price, consistently: affordable self-contained vehicles, good value for budget travellers. Pre-booking communication over WhatsApp is praised as responsive, and individual staff are named for being accommodating. When the process works — van as described, deposit returned on time — reviewers say so straightforwardly.
What renters flag
One complaint dominates this page, and it is not about the vehicles.
- Bond refund delays. Renters describe waiting 40 days, 50 days, in one case close to three months for the return of deposits running to several thousand dollars — well past the company's own stated window. Several resolved the matter only via credit card chargeback. This is the single most common complaint across the full span of reviews, not a cluster in one bad month.
- Vehicle condition and missing equipment. Dirty interiors, cosmetic damage, non-working air conditioning, missing cutlery. One reviewer paying over AUD 8,000 for two weeks described a rooftop tent too filthy to use.
- Post-rental customer service. Pre-booking communication draws praise; the pattern reverses after the trip. Reviewers describe weeks-long waits for responses to complaints, and resolutions they found inadequate.
The listing is combined, so a share of this is Australian
The company operates roughly thirteen depots in Australia and two in New Zealand, so the majority of reviews trace to Australian rentals — treat the score as evidence about the brand's operating standard rather than about a particular New Zealand branch.
Campervan Village and Wicked Campers are sister companies, sharing depots, fleet and ownership. Wicked Campers has its own Trustpilot listing with more reviews and a higher rating. Some reviewers note that Wicked Campers staff handled their Campervan Village pickup — a detail worth knowing when reading either page.
from 1,093 reviews
jucy.com, the single shared Australia and New Zealand listing.
- 47% are 5-star and 34% are 1-star.
- Replies to 22% of negative reviews — the lowest rate here.
By far the largest sample on this page, and the most polarised: an average of 2.2 built almost entirely out of five-star and one-star reviews, with barely a fifth of reviewers in between. Nobody has a mediocre JUCY rental. They have a cheap, cheerful one or a bad one.
What renters like
The positive half is about price and people: affordable, easy to book, easy to collect, with staff who take the time to show renters how the van works. That praise is frequent and it is not faint.
What renters flag
The negative third clusters into three distinct complaints, and they are worth separating because they call for different checks.
- Charges appearing after the trip — deposits, waiver excesses and administrative fees for infringements. The most common of the three.
- Vehicle condition comes second — older vans, faults developing mid-trip, breakdowns.
- What happens next is third, where reviewers describe slow refunds and being held responsible for failures they did not cause. The 22% reply rate belongs to this third cluster rather than sitting apart from it.
The gap to Google is the widest in this market
This score sits against 4.1 on JUCY's Auckland depot listing, and the distance between them is the clearest illustration of what Trustpilot measures. Google reviews are largely written at or just after the depot, where JUCY does well. Trustpilot reviews are written after the trip and after the final invoice. Both are true; they are about different moments.
from 14 reviews
www.travellers-autobarn.co.nz, the New Zealand domain.
- No 5-star reviews at all, and 79% are 1-star.
Fourteen reviews cannot carry a verdict about a company. But a distribution with nothing above three stars in it is a shape rather than a score, and it is worth looking at even at this sample size.
What renters flag
What the reviews describe is unusually consistent.
- Serious mechanical failure partway through a trip — engines, brakes, warning lights.
- Followed by a dispute about who pays for it, and handling that reviewers found dismissive. Several describe being presented with a large repair liability for a failure a garage had attributed to the vehicle rather than to their driving.
One of the fourteen is about the company's United States operation and appears to have been filed here by mistake.
Google disagrees, and both readings are evidence
The company's New Zealand depot listings there are strongly positive on several hundred reviews each. The most likely explanation is that this page is where the unhappy tail collects rather than a representative sample of Travellers Autobarn rentals — which is exactly what a fourteen-review page attracting people with a grievance would look like.
What to check
The useful response is not to rule the company out on fourteen reviews. It is to know what to check: the condition of the vehicle at handover, and specifically what the rental agreement says about liability when a mechanical failure is not your fault.
A profile exists at biglittlecampers.com but it is unclaimed and carries zero reviews, so there is no score and nothing to summarise.
This is not a warning sign
Trustpilot skews towards larger operators and towards companies that actively invite reviews; a small New Zealand outfit that does neither will simply be absent. Absence of a Trustpilot page is absence of evidence, not evidence of a problem.
The company is well reviewed elsewhere
Its Auckland depot listing on Google carries several hundred reviews at an exceptionally high rating, and New Zealand travel review sites cover it too. When we publish the Google round-up for this market, that is where Big Little Campers will actually be assessed.
There is no business page for wakacampa.com under any domain variant.
The only listing belongs to its predecessor brand
Bookacampa, at
bookacampa.co.nz, sits at 3.8 from seven reviews, with nothing newer than
October 2019. The reviews there are mostly warm, and mostly about the booking
service — helpful agents, good rates, quick replies.
We are not treating that as a rating for Waka Campa, and neither should you. Seven reviews, seven years old, filed under a name the company no longer trades as, tell you nothing reliable about the operation running depots in Auckland, Christchurch and Queenstown today. Its Google depot listings are current and actively reviewed, and that is the evidence to use until a Trustpilot presence exists.
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