In this video, Kat from Wandering Bird walks viewers through her systematic approach to locating, evaluating, and booking paid campsites for motorhome and van travel across the UK and Europe. She first clarifies that the guide focuses on booked, fee‑based sites rather than wild‑camping spots. The process is split into two geographic sections. For the UK, she relies on membership clubs (Caravan & Motorhome Club, Camping & Caravanning Club) to locate both large sites and small certified locations (CL/CS), then supplements with the PitchUp website, the Search4Sites app (which also lists pubs, wild‑parking, and CL/CS sites), and the Brit Stops scheme that offers free overnight stays at partner businesses in exchange for a purchase. She discusses the pros and cons of online booking versus phone calls, especially for tiny CL sites. For Europe, she shifts to tools better suited to continental travel: the Park4Night app/website for comprehensive listings (including waste points, wild spots, and Aires), and the ACSI Europe Campsites app which provides a vetted list of over 9,000 inspected sites and a discount card for off‑peak travel. She notes that PitchUp is less useful in Europe, and highlights local hospitality schemes such as France Passion that let travelers stay for free at vineyards or other attractions after a purchase. Throughout, Kat emphasizes assessing campsite proximity to attractions or family, balancing exact location against flexibility, and using memberships and apps to streamline booking and ensure quality. The video ends with a call to action to subscribe and a promise of more travel tips.
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Want to know how we find campsites on our trips? This video is for you. Hey, I'm Kat, and welcome to Wandering Bird, where we share tips and tricks for motorhomers and campervanners to help you make the most of your time on the road. Now, a question that I get asked all the time is, how do we find campsites? Or, can you tell me the best campsites in this particular area? And I could, maybe if we've been there, I could share some of our recommendations, but it's much better for me to share with you how we choose campsites, how we find them, and how we will then assess them to hopefully find decent ones. And I hope that you will find that useful. Before we get started, if you're new to the channel, hi, welcome! If you find this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up, and we would love it if you subscribed. So let's talk about how we find campsites. Now, to be clear, in this video I'm not talking about how you find wild spots or, or free spots. I'm talking about campsites, places that you have to book and pay to stay in. If you do want to know more about how we find our wild camping spots, I'll leave the link somewhere below for you, but in this video it's just about how we find campsites in a certain area. Now, there are a couple of ways that you can slice and dice this. The first is obviously whether or not you're going to be in the UK and Europe, and the second is do you want to stay at a very specific place if you're going to see an attraction or if you're visiting family, or do you just want to stay in a general area? So for example, if you were going to Cornwall, do you want to stay right by Land's End as close as you can, Or do you want to stay somewhere nearby where you can drive to? So it doesn't matter if there's a campsite within a mile or within 10 miles. And they are different ways of looking at it, and it will depend a little bit on the method that you use to find them. So let me go into it and I'll explain what I mean. So let's split this into 2 halves. Let's talk about the UK and then we'll talk about Europe a little bit later. So in the UK, there are a couple of ways that I find campsites. The first place I generally look, if we want to go in a general region, so for example, when I visited Norfolk, I actually looked on the Caravan and Motorhome Club website, and they've also got a great app, and I use that. I use that to find both proper big campsites and also to find the CL. The Caravan and Motorhome Club have CL certified locations, which are really small campsites, only 5 pitches. I'll leave a link somewhere near here so that you can actually see more about those. And the Camping and Caravanning Club have CS sites, certified sites, which are exactly the same thing. They're small sites up to about 5 pitches. Now you can use either the Caravan and Motorhome Club or the Camping and Caravanning Club. We're actually members of both, but I prefer the website on the Caravan and Motorhome Club by miles, so I tend to use that just to see if there's one— given that we're members— see if there's one near where we want to be visiting. Now the campsites are brilliant because you can actually book those through the app or through the website, easy peasy. The CL sites, you do have to phone them up and speak to somebody to see if they've got any space, which can be a bit frustrating because most of the time they're farmers or they have an additional business, so they're not sitting by the phone waiting waiting for your call. So if you do want to book something last minute, it can be quite difficult to get hold of them to see if they've got a space, which is why I much prefer being able to book online if I possibly can. But that's the first place I look, and I will leave all the details of this in the notes below so you can find everything really straightforwardly. The next place I look, if I'm looking for a specific campsite or a proper campsite, the next place I look is a website called PitchUp, and they are just really easy to use, and it will tell you all of the campsites in a certain area, and a lot of the times it's it's got a link straight through to their website where you can probably book directly their website, or it'll have a phone number where you can phone them. And I just really like their website. I'm in no way affiliated with them whatsoever, but I just find it a really, really useful tool. So I tend to use that a lot if there's a specific place that I need to stay by. I tend to use that if the Caravan and Motorhome Club don't have a site nearby. Now the next place we use in the UK is a website or an app— I tend to use the app more, to be honest— called Search 4 Sites. And that's fantastic because that will show you either campsites, it will show you the CLs and the CSs. It will also show you pubs that will allow overnight stays if you have a meal in their restaurant or in their pub, and it will also show you some wild parking spots. I said at the beginning this isn't about that in this video, but you will find a lot of that information on the Search 4 Sites app. I believe there is now a small yearly charge for that, and it's well worth getting because the amount of information in there is superb. And so that's really, really good if you want to stay at a, for example, in Land's End or, I don't know, near Cambridge— talking about our Norfolk road trip— you then you can select that specific location You can see all of the options around you, and then you can decide what's best for you. And there are also a lot of details on there, so you can generally find websites or phone numbers if you do need to make a booking at a campsite. And the last thing that I use in the UK, if we're just looking for somewhere to stay overnight in the van, I am a member of Brit Stops. I think they are fantastic. If you don't know what Brit Stops are, they are a scheme that has got together with a lot of businesses around the UK, quite a lot of pubs, but there are also things like farm shops, places that have got quite a big car park, already, and they are prepared to let you stay overnight, normally for free, as long as you have had a meal in their restaurant or drunk in their pub or bought some stuff from the farm shop. And there's all sorts of incredible locations that you can stay, and they are a really, really good way of exploring a bit more and seeing a little bit more about the local place that you're in. We're big believers in, you know, eating local dishes and food, so if you go somewhere like a A local farm shop or a local cafe or something, and you can try some of the local dishes for where you are. And that's a really nice way of blending travel and food and all these nice things that we enjoy. So Brit Stops, a brilliant scheme to be involved in, highly, highly recommend them. So moving on to Europe. Europe we do slightly differently. Now, when we travel in Europe, we don't tend to book up campsites. Having said that, when we take our motorbikes and we are going to go off riding our motorbikes, for example, we're planning a trip to the Black Forest very shortly, we know that the main aim of that trip is going to be to tour around on our motorcycle, so we want somewhere safe to leave the van, and we use campsites all the time then. It's well worth it just for the peace of mind. So when we're doing that is when I start looking for campsites and proper places to stay that I know are going to be secure. So to find them, the first place that I look always is something called Park4Night. Now that is both an app and a website. I believe the website you can still use for free. I think the app's got a small charge for it, And I think to get some of the, the more detailed information, you do need to pay for it through the website as well. It's something like £7 for the year. Totally worth it. Park4Night is fantastic whether you want to find motorhome waste points, whether you want to find wild camping spots, whether you want to find campsites or CSAs or CLs or Aires. And again, if you don't know what an aire is, I will leave the link to the details about that. But all of that information is on Park4Night. It's an amazing app, and that's how I tend to find and have a look and see if there's a campsite in that area, and then I can find out what the name of it is, and you generally have to then Google and find out a phone number or an email address if you want to contact them to see if you can have space for the nights that you want to be there and make your booking that way. Now, the next thing that I use is ACSI. Now, ACSI is fantastic. Let's talk about the 2 main reasons or main options that they've got for you. If you're going to be traveling all throughout the year, so both the peak season and the low season, then you want to get in there— I think it's called their Europe Campsites app, it's also on the website as well— and that is a list of, I think it's over 9,000 campsites now that are inspected annually by ACSI representatives. And you know, and you've got the peace of mind of knowing, that those campsites are a really good quality. So if you want to book them, whether you're booking in the school holidays or in low season, if they're open in low season, you know what you're getting. So it's not so much of a gamble as going to be a dodgy French campsite. It's actually going to be a fairly decent quality. If you are able to travel outside of the peak season, you can sign up to get in their camping card, and that will give you a discount on any of their campsites that have signed up to the scheme, which means that you can stay at the exact same campsites for a little bit less money. But that only works if you're able to travel outside of the peak season. But even if you can only travel in school holidays, you can still be a member of the main Europe Campsites app which will allow you to have that peace of mind that the campsites you're staying at are decent quality. Now you can actually use the Pitch Up website for Europe. They have got a few campsites over there, but it's not anywhere near as many as you would find on Park4Night, so I tend to not use Pitch Up so much in Europe as I will in the UK. And the last place that you can look is the Brit Stops, you know, the ones that have all the pub stopovers. They have similar schemes to that all over Europe, and again I'll leave a link where you can find a list of what they're all called. So for example, in France they have a scheme called France Passion, so there are vineyards. If you enjoy your wine, it's fantastic because you can turn up in your motorhome, you can go and pay and do a wine tour, buy a couple of bottles of wine, and stay there overnight for free. So you can really enjoy your wine tour and make the most of it. And those schemes are really, really good because it does allow you to travel and get involved in the things that you enjoy. I think also in France there's a snail farm as well, which would be quite fun to go and have a look around. And then of course you can stay there for free if you paid for the tour. So if that's the kind of thing that you enjoy doing anyway, it's well worth signing up to the schemes. And again, they've got those— I think pretty much all of the main countries in Europe have got a similar accommodation scheme like that. If you are a member of those, then it's well worth looking at that to see if there's a site near to where you're heading. So those are the main ways that we find campsites across the UK and Europe, and I'll leave all the links for that below. I hope you found that helpful. Thank you for your time. If you're new to the channel, by all means hit subscribe, and I'll see you on the next video. Bye!
