Spaceships Brand Guidelines: A 2004 Kiwi People-Mover Camper and Its “Space Stations”

A Kiwi idea from the backpacker-bus trade.

Spaceships is a campervan rental brand from New Zealand. Its own story page says it was “established in 2004”, and the travel trade site TravelMole reported in August 2007 that the concept had been launched in October 2004. The same report named Neil Geddes as managing director of both Spaceships New Zealand and Stray, its sister company, which ran a backpacker bus network; in February 2008 TravelMole called him “the mastermind behind Spaceships”. The company’s own account says its founders came to the idea from “years of developing backpacker bus networks”.

The idea was a new kind of rental vehicle. Spaceships says it asked travellers what they wanted for exploring New Zealand and set out to fill “the niche between a rental car and a campervan rental”. Rather than convert commercial vans, it chose what it calls “people movers”: family vehicles bought from Japan a few years old, with automatic gearboxes and air conditioning. The company says it settled on the Toyota Estima, and its help centre still describes every Spaceship as based on that model. TravelMole described the result in 2008 as “a modified Toyota people mover”.

The interiors are the company’s own work. Spaceships says it builds them “in our own factory to our own design”, and singles out the cooker and the storage it fits under the bed; it adds that its extendable bed and awning give more usable floor space than a Toyota Hiace van. In 2007 TravelMole reported that the interiors for Australian vehicles would be built in New Zealand and shipped across the Tasman, with a larger, locally built fridge as the only significant difference.

Recognition followed quickly. According to TravelMole’s 2007 report, Spaceships won a New Zealand tourism award for innovation in 2006 and gained Qualmark accreditation, the New Zealand government’s official quality endorsement, in 2007. The company’s own pages credit the 2006 award with recognising “a new category of rental vehicle”.

Across the Tasman, to London and back.

Australia came through a partner. In August 2007 TravelMole reported that Adventure Tours Australia, a tour operator with guided bus and four-wheel-drive trips and the Oz Experience backpacker bus network, had signed an exclusive licence to operate Spaceships in Australia. Spaceships held a licence to import 100 vehicles a year into Australia, the report said, and Adventure Tours would take the whole supply; vehicles were arriving at about ten a month, with hires due to start in January 2008. Geddes was quoted on the “synergies” between the two businesses’ backpacker networks.

The official Australian launch was held at the company’s William Street office in Kings Cross, Sydney, TravelMole reported in February 2008. Its general manager, Craig Hart, who had come from Adventure Tours’ international sales team, said the Australian fleet stood at 40 vehicles and aimed for more than 200 within a year. The company’s New Zealand story page now dates the Australian launch to 2008 and counts six depots there, while the Australian website names eight cities: Adelaide, Airlie Beach, Brisbane, Cairns, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

Europe followed. By the company’s own account it opened in the UK in 2009 with one depot in London, and in 2013 added Edinburgh and Ireland; it says its Dublin depot later closed because of legal and financial changes after Brexit. The UK business did not last. Its UK website now says Spaceships Rentals UK stopped its campervan and motorhome rental business in October 2025, and that the site will carry on as a road-trip blog.

The fleet has changed too. The company’s help centre says the Rocket, once its entry-level model with a cooler box instead of a fridge, has been phased out and replaced by the Beta, a budget model with a fridge-freezer, a smart battery system and USB ports. In New Zealand, its pages name depots in Auckland and Christchurch, and describe the business as “New Zealand owned and operated”.

Campervan rental in Australia and New Zealand.

Campervan and motorhome rental is sold with pictures of the open road, but two different kinds of business sit behind those pictures. Some companies own and run fleets of their own vehicles from depots; others are marketplaces, on which private owners list their own caravans, campervans and motorhomes and the platform handles the booking and the cover. Camplify, launched in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 2015, and PaulCamper, launched in Berlin in 2013, are marketplaces of the second kind, and since December 2022 both have belonged to the same group listed in Australia.

This guide looks first at the vehicle as each company publishes it: in a company livery or paint scheme, photographed against a landscape, or listed as an owner’s own van in that owner’s own photographs. Where a company describes its vans, its colours or its paintwork, the guide gives that as the company’s own account, with the date of the source.

Names come next. Rental firms give names to their vehicle ranges and models, and marketplaces give names to their memberships and cover products: Camplify sells a premium membership called Club Camplify and member cover under the name MyWay, while PaulCamper says it built its rental cover together with Allianz. Bookings are made online, and some companies also offer an app, as Camplify does on its website; this guide describes such apps plainly, from what the companies say about them.

Finally, there are the owners. Some names in this category belong to larger groups, and corporate pages, annual reports and stock-exchange filings show who owns what and since when. This guide follows those documents and dated press reports, gives fleet, depot and country counts only as a dated source states them, and treats the colours and typefaces shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than official brand values.

A name that sets the whole vocabulary.

The name does most of the brand’s work, and the company carries it through everything it writes. Its customers are “Space Travellers”, its staff the “Spaceships Crew”, its range the “Spaceships Universe”, and its trips the #SpaceshipsRoadTrip. In 2008 TravelMole described a network of “space stations”, activity and information points where travellers could find itineraries, guidebooks, local contacts and deals, and reported that the first ones had opened along Australia’s east coast, with plans to add more across what the company called Australia’s “Outer Space”.

The product promise has stayed close to the original idea. The tag line TravelMole quoted in 2008 was “Like a good car to drive, with more useful features than a campervan”; the company now says its vans “drive like a good car and sleep like a campervan”, and calls them “the Swiss Army Knife of campers”. It also presents itself as part of New Zealand’s camping debate: it says it takes an active part in the Responsible Camping Forum, and that it has a planting and community project near Akaroa, with public walking tracks and tens of thousands of native plants.

For a design guide, Spaceships shows how a single playful name can supply a brand with its whole vocabulary, from depots to customers. Compare JUCY, another New Zealand rental brand built for budget travellers, and Escape Campervans. For this guide we use a night-sky indigo, a mint and a beacon yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Spaceships’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.