campercontact.com

54 Years in a Different Place Every Night? Campercontact.com

In Team Zagan we currently use a range of options to find overnight places to stay while we’re wandering in our motorhome:

In the past we’ve also used campingcar-infos.com (which is only in French), the All the Aires series of books, iOverlander.com and France Passion. These all remain good, and we’ll use ’em again in the future I’m sure. So why, you might wonder, are we looking at yet another source of stopovers? Why are we looking at the campercontact.com offline app? Three reasons:

  1. To help satisfy our unending, insatiable quest (**smiley**) to find you, dear reader, the best sources of motorhome touring information available! With over 20,000 locations listed, with just campercontact.com you could stay in a different place every night for 54 years, so it’s worth a look-see.
  2. Because our mates had a copy while we were in Morocco and it looked pretty good.
  3. Because the nice folks at campercontact.com gave us a free 3 month trial so we could have a look and report back.

We’ll let you know when we have found places in it going forward, so for now, here’s a short overview of our installing it and playing with our new campercontact.com offline database (which costs €5.99 a year, about a fiver when we buy it, which after having a good nose around it, we will):

1. The app is called 'All Motorhome Parkings' in Google Play for Android devices. It's available for Apple kit too

The app is called ‘All Motorhome Parkings’ in Google Play for Android devices. It’s available for Apple kit too

campercontact.com screenshot

The install process, including downloading photos, took over an hour. Best done on a broadband WiFi connection

campercontact.com screenshot

Once installed you get a ‘Lite’ version, which doesn’t let you see much detail until you buy the in-app upgrade to the full version

Boon, here's the full version

Boom, here’s the full version

Tapping All Sites brings up a list of nearby stopovers, using the GPS in the phone to work out where we are

Tapping All Sites brings up a list of nearby stopovers, using the GPS in the phone to work out where we are

I prefer using a map, so I've tapped on Map to see the locations around us

I prefer using a map, so I’ve tapped on Map to see the locations around us

campercontact.com screenshot

We’re thinking of heading to Antequera, so I’ve tapped on the location icon there to get some summary info. The Rating is only 5.2 out of 10, from 16 reviews – not great, but I can see it is free of charge too

Tapping on the summary info brings up more info and photos

Tapping on the summary brings up more info and photos

I've scrolled down and tapped on the reviews to see translated feedback from people who've stayed there

I’ve scrolled down and tapped on the reviews to see translated feedback from people who’ve stayed there. It looks sometimes noisy, sloping and hard to find, but otherwise good

There are stacks of features, like the ability to filter based on services available, costs, ratings etc, almost all of which i doubt we’ll ever use, but those we find the most useful are:

  1. The ability to download all the photos, data and offline maps to the phone, so we can use the app anywhere without hitting our 3G/4G data allowance.
  2. The ability to browse for locations via a map.
  3. The feedback from other people who’ve stayed in each location. This is priceless to get an accurate idea what the place is like, if anything has changed since the entry was posted (a big advantage over books whihc go out of date as soon as they are printed) and what’s around it, etc. The more reviews there are for a place, the more we trust the headlight rating. If it’s a low number of reviews, we make sure we look at them as some folks will review a place as one star without saying anything bad about it.

Campercontact.com has stopovers not in our other information sources, and reviews that aren’t in other places too. So, it will be very interesting going forward to compare it to our most frequently used source of stopovers which is currently park4night.com. This tends to have more informal/free parking areas in it which we prefer, and hopefully campercontact.com will prove to be just as good, and as a combined force (for just over €15 a year, less than the price of a night on a campsite) I think we’ll be spoiled for choice when it comes to free and cheap overnight stays.

Cheers, Jay

10 replies
  1. www.travelwithkevinandruth.com says:

    We used the online version of Campercontact a lot during our two months in Spain and Portugal. In fact, it was probably the best resource out of the several that we used. But, of course you have to be online to use it, so I can definitely see the benefit of an app that’s usable offline.

    Reply
    • Nigel Lindsell says:

      Hi Guys. We are going to be using it for the first time on our upcoming trip through Scandinavia. Inspired by you of course!
      As you said – it looks good.

      Reply
  2. Jane says:

    We’ve used the offline version of Campercontact for the last year. Its been our ‘go to’ resource because of working offline and we’ve found it really good. We haven’t tried the offline version of park4night yet so may give it a go. Also started to use searchforsites but I don’t think it is available offline yet.

    Reply
  3. Wayne says:

    ​What a coincidence, we’ve been using the Campercontact app for a month now.

    Pro’s- Heaps of info, loads of choice, like the ‘service points only’ too, great (on-line) map view, great (on-line) review translations, love a good picture of the spot, cheap app.

    Con’s- Big lumpy app, has crashed a few times (work in progress I’m sure) off-line map could be better, would like more photos of spots.

    Verdict: Well worth the expense, ours paid us back in a week. The more people use it, the better it will get.

    Kindest, Wayne

    Reply
  4. Aussie Bruce - (Mark Bartlett) says:

    Hi guys, another great post.
    We have used this extensively in Italy, Croatia and then up into Germany/Netherlands. Always accurate.
    Have used it again today near Basingstoke UK and again 100%.
    Whenever you can, take the time to put a review up, very easy to do and invaluable to future users.

    Mark

    Reply
  5. Chris and Peter says:

    Bought the app a couple of weeks ago and used it on our trip to Germany. But it turned out our ACSI book contained allthe campercontact places as well. Doooh! Success with the app!

    Reply
  6. Nigel Lindsell says:

    Update from us. We have just spent 11 weeks travelling through Scandinavia and have used the app all the time. It’s been absolutely brilliant! Can’t recommend it highly enough.

    Reply

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