Want to find EPIC places to stay with your van? WATCH THIS

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 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 subscribe. 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 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 in 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 two 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 five 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 site certified sites which are exactly the same thing they're small sites up to about five 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 site 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 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 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 motel 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 for Sites and that's fantastic because that will show you either campsites it'll show you the CL's and the CS's 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 for 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 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 somewhere to stay overnight in the van I am a member of Britstops I think they are fantastic if you don't know what Britstops 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 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 Britstops 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 park for night 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 more detailed information you do need to pay for it to the website as well it's something like seven pounds for the year totally worth it park for night 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 siestas or seals or airs and again if you don't know what an air is I will leave the link to the details about that but all of that information is on park for night 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 that way now the next thing that I use is ACSI now ACSI is fantastic talk about the two 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 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 that what you're getting so it's not so much of a gamble as it's 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 campsite 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 campsite 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 park for night 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 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 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