Van life gives you the ultimate freedom to explore and venture to places you might never have gone before, which is certainly true for our adventures around Europe. But alongside that freedom, you also have to juggle the unknown factor of finding places to stay the night.
So here’s the big question.
How do we find places to stay the night?
This question is probably the most important for anyone new to family van life or taking on a big adventure like us. But, we have always found this rather easy because from day one we have been using the Campercontact App to find places to stay. This app was an absolute gem for us when we travelled around Europe in 2019 as complete newbies, helping us to find a place to stay each night for 5 months in 10 different countries, from Scandinavia to France and Spain. And here we are again touring Europe in 2022 and finding some incredible park ups with the help of the Campercontact App.
How do we get peace of mind about our park ups?
For us as a family, the place we decide to rest our heads for the night is important and security is one of the most important factors. We want somewhere that is tried and tested and this is where we take full advantage of the reviews section on the app to make sure a place has received good recommendations from other members of the campervan and motorhome community. We also look at the photos. The app not only allows us to read through the reviews but gives us an average rating that we can also include in the filters.
Planning ahead or taking each day as it comes?
A lot of the time our travels involve heading in a rough direction but not really knowing exactly where we are going. It’s then that the app becomes a really useful tool for us, because we can use it to search around our location to find something suitable close-by. And with a total of 38,000 stopovers listed on the app (and growing!), we’ve never found ourselves too far away from somewhere to rest our heads. Other times when we are a little more organised, we like to plan our route out a few days in advance, looking at the app to find our parking spots along the way and using the favourites button to mark our stopovers and keep them saved.
What do we look for in a park up?
The type of park up’s we choose aren’t always the same, they change depending on lots of different factors. Sometimes we are are looking for a basic, free park up to simply spend the night and move on early the next morning, other times we are looking for a campsite with laundry, wifi and maybe a playground for the kids. Or, we might just be looking for a service stop during the day to refill on fresh water and empty our waste tanks. With the Campercontact app we can use the search filters to filter down the park up locations so we can find exactly what we are looking for usually by filtering down by price and facilities. The PRO version also has the added benefit of the route button, which with just one click will open google maps navigation to the site you have chosen.
We wouldn’t be without this app on our travels and we love how user-friendly it is, taking the stress out of finding somewhere to stay.
TRY Campercontact PRO for FREE!
With the Promo code ‘TWTK-PRO’ you benefit from all the advantages of Campercontact PRO until 22 September 2022. Enter the code via the menu in the app under ‘My profile’ > ‘Enter promotional code’.
You can download the app in the App store (iOS) and Google Play Store (Android).
For more information about the Campercontact app, click here.
*This blog has been sponsored by Campercontact, but all opinions expressed authentically belong to ourselves.
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