When is the best time to Book your Summer Camping holiday ?

If you are planning to go on a Eurocamp or Keycamp holiday then you might wonder "When is the best time to book your holiday ?"

There are usually early booking offers and late booking offers, but the particular campsite you have chosen may get booked up quickly. So the question is when is the best time to book ? 

If you are going in High Season of July and August you will really need to plan ahead if you want to go a particular site.

I have just scanned the holidays which are still available at the start of March 2011 for this summer 2011. I have found pretty good availability even for the peak of the High Season at the start of August. Only the most popular sites have limited availability.

If you are going to a very popular site you may need to book early. For example La Garangeoire in the Southern Vendee and Les Deux Fontaines in Southern Brittany at the beginning of March already nearly booked up for certain weeks of July.
The good news though is that you can reserve holidays with Eurocamp and Keycamp for as little at £100. So if you have a fairly good idea of where you want to go on holiday why not reserve it early on and then as it gets nearer the time to pay in full, you can see if you can afford to go ahead with the holiday. In these Credit Crunch times with lack of job security this is a good idea.

Two years ago we holidayed at Les Deux Fontaines in Brittany and we get to the site in late June/early July and wondered how was it so difficult to book two weeks holiday when many of the mobile homes seemed to be empty. We discovered that this is because they were maybe booked out for a holiday that started towards the end of our stay. So a holidaymaker only overlapped with us by 2 days but that meant that that particular mobile home was unavailalbe for the particular 13 night stretch that we were looking for.  However, if you are willing to move mobile home half way through your holiday or even to change site then you may find there are still options available to let you holiday in the sites or area that you have chosen.

If you are feeling adventurous and want to try "real camping" then the good news is that the Eurocamp or Keycamp tents are often the last things to book up on a site. Mobile homes seem to be more popular.

If you would like some more information to help you plan your holiday, we now have 20 different campsites in France which you can read about on our website http://www.bestfrenchcampsites.com/.


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Happy New Year - Bonne Année ! - 2011

In France, New Year's Eve is called La Saint-Sylvestre and is usually celebrated with a feast, called le Réveillon de Saint-Sylvestre. The feast tends to include special items like champagne and foie gras.

This year in France, there are to be an increase in numbers of police working over New Year's Eve, to avoid the usual problems with festivities and crowds, but also to deal with the additional threat from terrorism. No particular threat has been made to France but police numbers have been increased anyway to ensure safety. There has also been a ban on the sale of large fireworks and a ban on consumption of alcohol in certain public spaces.

We wish everyone a good New Year and as we continue to suffer cold weather here in the UK, lets look forward to some better weather as we look forward to our summer camping in the sun !

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Keycamp Celebrates 35th Birthday !

Keycamp are celebrating their 35th Birthday by allowing you to reserve your 2011 Holiday for only £35 !!

There may also be lots of last minute summer bargains as according to the Radio 4 news this morning holiday companies are reporting low bookings in Europe for this year.

Click here to book a last minute 2010 holiday or look at holidays with Keycamp for next year ! www.keycamp.co.uk

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A Campsite Review

Well so far today no further news of strikes ! I think every method of travel almost was covered with the news yesterday so lets hope this disruption wont head into the summer to affect us all. However I can sympathise with the strikers - a return to Victorian Britain with a few people taking all the money that the rest of us had made and then not paying the workers properly !

Anyway to get us back in the holiday mood, here is an interesting article from The Telegraph in 2007. It is pretty good at summing up the problems with some of the bigger campsites in the high season months of July and August - some of the big sites may be exactly what you are looking for but read the reviews in the brochures carefully to see if you can find out if the site you are planning to go to is really what you are looking for. He also discusses the advantages of booking a tent rather than a mobile home. I would agree that all the washing up and shower facilities in the sites we have reviewed were all spotlessly clean and its a great way to meet other campers, over the washing up !
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/france/dordogne/737344/French-camping-without-tears.html

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