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:
- The free Park4night.com website listing over 37,000 stopovers, and the offline app version which costs around €10 a year and has the same information as the website but requires no Internet connection.
- The £22 ACSI out of season camping discount card, which gives you access to over 3000 campsites across Europe at preferential rates (€11 to €19) outside peak season.
- The Camperstop Book, review here (the 2017 English version is £27, the 2017 French version is £18).
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:
- 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.
- Because our mates had a copy while we were in Morocco and it looked pretty good.
- 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):
The app is called ‘All Motorhome Parkings’ in Google Play for Android devices. It’s available for Apple kit too
The install process, including downloading photos, took over an hour. Best done on a broadband WiFi connection
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
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
I prefer using a map, so I’ve tapped on Map to see the locations around us
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 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. 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:
- 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.
- The ability to browse for locations via a map.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
There’s also quite a good app called ‘Stellplatz Radar’. Like others you can search for motorhome stops within a certain distance from your current location. It also shows motorhome dealers and servicing/maintenance companies. It’s a German app but really easty to use: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.promobil.mobillife&hl=en or https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/stellplatz-radar/id360686968?mt=8
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
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
Basingstoke? Sounds like you’re on the verge of another bunch of European wanderings? Have fun folks (if you’re interested, these guys blog at http://aussiebruce.com/). Cheers, Jay
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!
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.
Congratulations by the application, it is very useful for those who live great adventures.