Maps of All Motorhome European Aires
There are literally thousands of aires, free and low cost motorhome overnight stopovers across Europe which aren’t campsites, and can massively reduce your budget while still giving you a peaceful night’s sleep.
These official locations are referred to as ‘aires’ (in France, and as a general term in any country), ‘stellplatz’ or ‘stellplätze’ (in German-speaking countries) and ‘sostas’ (in Bella Italia). This post gives links to the best motorhome aires books and maps, enabling you to find and use these amazing networks.
What are Aires?
Aires are official overnight motorhome parking locations. They’re first-come-first-served, some are free and some cost a few Euros (in cities you might pay €20 to €30).
Some have marked-out spaces, many don’t. You can generally stay anywhere between 24 hours and a few days, and there’s no need to check in or check out. The main downside to aires is the fact you can’t generally ‘camp’ in them, so putting chairs out, awnings, BBQs and so on is usually a no-no. Only a small number allow you to book ahead, they’re first-come-first-served.
For an idea of what these places look like, here are some of our favourites across Europe, and here are a few short videos showing some example aires we’ve visited:
How do I Find Aires on My Route?
How do you find these cracking places? Good news! They’re no secret, and anyone can stay in them. No need to book in advance, sign in when you arrive or leave, and they’re very often located close to the centres of cities, towns and villages, or in wonderful natural surroundings. Here are some of the best maps you can find for European motorhome aires; we use them all.
campercontact.com
Camper Contact is available as a website or smart phone/tablet app (which allows offline viewing when Internet reception isn’t good or to save data), this database is one of the very best available for finding great quality aires.
It only includes official aires, service points and campsites, not car parks or other wild camping locations. The website is free, but the app has a small charge, well worth paying for the huge range of information available.
park4night.com
Park4Night is also available as both a website and offline phone/tablet app, this rivals campercontact for the quantity of motorhome parking information available.
Park4night differs from campercontact in that it includes semi-official and unofficial (wild camping) locations too, which we’ve found very useful in countries with fewer aires, or out of season in more remote countries when aires are sometimes closed.
All the Aires Books
If you prefer your maps in paper format, these books from Vicarious Media are some of the most popular English language ones available. You can buy them from Vicarious Media on their website. They don’t cover all of Europe though, so if you’re planning a longer tour you may want to have a look at the Camperstop book instead (see below).
Camperstop Book
Camperstop covers far more countries than the All the Aires books and is cheaper to buy, so is our favourite aires map in paper format. It comes out once a year, but we’re still using a book from a couple of years ago and apart from the prices being a bit out of date, it’s pretty accurate. You can get the book, in English, from Amazon using this link. Like All the Aires, the book concentrates on official aires, not wild camping locations or campsites.
Searchforsites
While the searchforsites website and app is geared up more towards campsites, it also includes aires across the UK and Europe and is well worth keeping an eye on while you’re out and about, especially if you like to stay on sites some of the time.
Here’s a link to the website and map.
Aires de Service 360
This is a simple, free (ad-driven) map of France showing a good number (not all, but none of ’em do) of the aires in France. Just click on an aire on this map and you’ll see a summary of the location with photos, lists of services and the cost (if any). It’s all in French, but there are lots of easy-to-understand symbols.
More Inspiration
Thanks for reading folks. If you’re looking for more inspiration, we’ve gathered together umpteen real-life tour maps from motorhome bloggers. Click on a map to see all of their stopovers as they toured. Some bloggers give links to posts they wrote for that location, so you can get more of a feel for the place.
And finally, we’ve pulled together our favourite 200 places we’ve slept in our motorhomes across Europe into a book: The 200. It’s available as a paperback or eBook from Amazon.
Guys, this is fantastic. I hope you dont mind, but I would like to link our blog to it. Many thanks.
Hi Nick, it really gives a great idea how many places there are to stay? We’ve found more aires not on this map too! Feel free to link to it, I’m not intending to change the URL of it, although I do want to see if I can get the pins to link directly to the http://www.campingcar-infos.com database. Cheers! Jay
Hi there,
we are using campingcars website and app as well and in combination with Google earth we are able to find good spots across UK and Europe where is no problem to park and stay couple of days. Also pubs are a good overnight place if you spend some money and then ask nicely if you can stay there….it usually works.
I find your website very helpfull therefore THANK YOU FOR SHARING!
Thanks Charlotte, happy travels! Jay
Hi folks
Great blog, only found it today and read the first couple of weeks this morning, inspirational and makes me wonder why I am sitting here and our van is on the drive unused since November.
Anyway you may find my site useful which is similar to you map and lists motorhome locations and campsites using the camping car info data base plus a number of other sources.
http://www.searchforsites.co.uk
Can I use any of your photos?
Hi Ian, that’s a great idea, and we often wondered why we were hunting through seven or eight different databases and books! I just assumed it would be too difficult to get source permission to build an aggregation service, but you’ve done it, well done and thanks, assuming you don’t bump into a load of legal issues, your site could easily grow into something massive.
Of course you can use our photos! We’d appreciate it if you can include a link back to ourtour.co.uk. We’ll add a page on our site linking back to your site (in the next few days – heading off into Tunis on the train today and need to take Charlie for a walk first!).
Cheers, and good luck (I suspect our van won’t move much next winter as we’ll be too skint to buy fuel!).
Jay and Ju
Hi guys, great log have had fun reading it. We have camped through Europe in the past but are trying to buy a LHD motorhome in the UK ( easier for Australians to register etc in the UK )at the moment to use in Europe next year for about 5 months. Thanks again John
Hi John, thanks for the comment, and we hope you guys have a fabulous time wandering Europe. We found the motorhome method travel to be just wonderful; so much freedom and so many incredible places to stay, I’m sure you’ll have an awesome experience. Cheers, Jason
Loving your Blog – we are off on a 12month tour of Europe soon and finding so much we need to know from your amazing site. Thank you
Dear Jason & Julie,
We are planning a (small) campervan trip around Europe for April-July, heading down through the Balkans, then up through Eastern Europe to northern Norway and back to UK. Came across your map of Aires which is wonderful; downloaded the file; and then tried to import it to Googlemaps at which point Googlemaps says “Error – invalid or unsupported data or file is too large to parse”. The problem may be an e-circumflex (French e with a hat on) in the word Foret in line 29 charachter 31. I am not computer savvy enough to know how to change it or how to get Google maps to open it anyway. Would you have any ideas to help. It seems such a brilliant resource that I would be sad to walk away from it.
Have a great time in Morocco. We birded there many years ago (1988) and saw lots of lovely things … and both caught typhoid so be careful with the water!
Safe travels and thanks for any help you can give.
Hi
We are taking our Kontiki swift to France this Summer for the first time and will probably use the Aires. Usually we stay on sites and as my husband doesn’t like doing number twos in the van, that’s ok on sites. But Aires won’t have them so how do you manage?
Hi Liz. The cassette loo in our van gets fully used! When we first started out with our camper we only used it for wee but those days are long gone. The cassette was designed for poop, and IMHO the whiff of old wee is often worse than the brown stuff. Happy travels, however you choose to go, cheers, Jay
Discovering Europe’s motorhome aires is a budget traveler’s dream! 🌍 Can you share your favorite aire spot and let’s swap hidden gems! 🚐💎