Full review

Sitting at the pinnacle of tourer quality, equipment level, weight and price, Buccaneers are among Britain’s most aspirational caravans. They’ve held that superlative rank for a long time, and with good reason. While not every caravan buyer wants to invest £30,000-plus in their holiday home on wheels, many do, and those who buy into the Buccaneer lifestyle do so because there is little to compare with them on the market.

That’s not just about level of equipment (a sophisticated automatic levelling system, Alde heating, an extractor fan, ATC, underfloor heating, internal water tank… the list goes on). It’s about ambiance. Deep pile carpet, curtains hanging on chrome café rods, big mirrors, big fridges, sinks that are indistinguishable from polished granite, seating that is sculpted.

And the Caravel has something else. This model, one of four twin axles in the Buccaneer range, has two rooms. They’re divided by a wooden door. Like an apartment. Think of the front half of the Caravel as a kitchen-lounge-dining room. Open the wide door and you are in a beautiful spacious bedroom with an en suite shower on one side and, opposite, a small room containing the washbasin and toilet.
 

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We mentioned “spacious”. That’s the key to Buccaneer’s unique appeal. This range is wider than almost all other 2016 mainstream tourers on the British market, at 2.45m. Only an Adria Adora Isonzo and Adria’s two Astella models are comparable in width, at 2.48m.

In the Caravel the extra width is especially noticeable in the bedroom. The bed is the same width as a domestic double bed and the floor space on either side of it is a generous 42cm at its narrowest point.

Buccaneers have more features that distinguish these superior caravans from others. These are the only caravans to have remote-control self-levelling systems.

Simply called Levelsystem, it runs from a central hub unit, mounted under the floor just behind the axle; inside it there is a gyroscopic sensor.

The system has six jacks; two at the axle and one at each of the corner steadies, which are fitted with extra-large load-spreaders; The whole procedure takes just a couple of minutes, controlled from a remote handset.

Buccaneers also have under-floor heating, which works in synergy with the Alde central heating system.

These models also have mobile phone connectivity, via Phantom Tracker, allowing you to control the Alde heating remotely.

And these caravans are equipped with the Alde load monitor system. This detects the amount of mains power you are using and switches off the Alde heating while you are using a device such as a hairdryer, to prevent you from overloading and tripping out your pitch’s supply. You can set the monitor to the level needed, for example 16 amps or 10 amps, depending on the supply to your pitch.

The Caravel has a 40-litre water tank, to make sure there’s always hot water for your shower even on frosty mornings.
 

Showering

Showering, too, gets a distinctive feature, it’s the new circular Ecocamel Orbit shower head, which has 10 clusters of spray nodules in a halo-shape designed to deliver an even spray. An air inlet in the base of the handle increases the flow rate.

The Caravel’s shower is in the offside forward corner of the bedroom. When you close the (piano-hinged) washbasin-toilet door across the caravan, the whole washing and bedroom area becomes one cohesive, lovely room, nicely isolated from the rest of the caravan.

Sleeping

The caravan’s extra width means that the bed has corners which are only slightly rounded, so this is a full sized bed, at 1.4m wide and 1.9m long. A triangular dressing table cabinet is alongside the shower, with a mirror above it. A second cabinet is in the nearside corner of the bedroom. The size of the wardrobes also benefits from the caravan’s extra width; each has 44cm of hanging space.

Shelves are set into the wardobes, on both sides of the bed, the prefect place for phones and your morning mug of coffee. And there are three drawers below each wardrobe.

Storage

The bed base offers less storage space than those in most caravans, for two reasons. The water tank is under here. And the bed base is shorter than the mattress and its frame, to create more floor space. This design also has the effect of making the caravan look even larger than it is! But less storage space here shouldn’t be a problem; there’s plenty of space for folding chairs under the nearside settee, and you can get into this space from the exterior, as well as via the full-length drop-down hatch. The offside under-settee area is mostly occupied by electrical and Alde heating installations but there is usable space here alongside them.

Dining

The table slides into its own cabinet on the fore end of the kitchen. The cabinet is about three times as wide as it needs to be for the table, which means the table is easy to get in and out and there is also storage space in here for, perhaps, a small table you might use outside or in an awning.

For snacks and minor meals, though, you won’t need to get the four-seater table out; the pull-out chest of drawers top creates a space that’s more than adequate, at 81 x64cm.

Lounging

The Caravel’s look is sumptuous. Picture this: Four enormous cushions covered in satiny cream fabric with a subtle pattern that looks silvery in bright light. Curtains, in the same fabric, are suspended from chunky chrome loops over café rods. Plain, pale suede-effect fabric and pale plain cream combine for the settees. Two big rooflights ensure the lounge is flooded with daylight. And heat from the Alde system is rising up from behind the backrests and from the floor to keep you toasty.

There’s a USB socket in the front nearside corner of the lounge beside a power point. But where do you connect your television? No aerial or satellite points are on view: it took us several minutes to uncover this, another Buccaneer refinement. TV connections are in a top cabinet, together with two mains socket, and there’s an aperture, closed when not in use, in the base of the locker, so that cables can be fed down to the cabinet top below, the ideal place for your TV. (There’s a second set of TV points in the bedroom, too.),Lounging, Buccaneer style, is a refined experience.

Kitchen

Three drawers, each 62cm wide; two 20cm deep and one twice that depth, take care of most item you need to store. There’s also a cabinet below the TV shelf, on the fore end of the kitchen. Four cabinets are on the wall, one of them fitted for bottles and goblets and all of them with hidden metal catches that you simply squeeze to open the doors.

A major feature of the Caravel’s kitchen is its giant fridge-freezer, with a 155-litre capacity. It’s opposite the main kitchen area, with the microwave above it, at a height that will be convenient for most statures, and with an additional cabinet above it.

The polished granite-effect rectangular sink is set into a surface measuring 88cm long. It’s not enormous by caravan standards but then, when you need more space, you have the option of taking over the TV shelf (that’s 32cm wide), on the fore end of the kitchen.

Two power points are close to the kitchen surface.

Towing

The extra width of Buccaneers makes them look formidable beasts on the road. Their grey sides and dark side windows accentuated by black panels creates a look calculated to turn heads as you tow. But how does the mighty 1923kg caravan handle? We’ve towed big Buccaneers before, and always found them to be beautifully, smoothly stable (given the right calibre of hefty vehicle, of course). Predictably, the 2016 Caravel delivered just the same confident easy tow during its review test.