As our confidence and experience grows on the road less travelled, we reflected on one of the changes we made for our Autumn trip to France: our approach to booking where we stay each night.

Although we’re living fulltime in our motorhome, we’re actually quite new to all this and when we ‘set sail’ for the first time, we got comfortable booking and staying in Club sites across the UK. It became a default position as I’ve not always been a ‘fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal’ and for me the idea of not having somewhere booked was really out of my comfort zone.

The trip to France gave us the opportunity to see how easy, or difficult, it would be to travel without booking in advance. We had the outline of a plan, places we wanted to visit and things we wanted to see, we hoped that just ‘turning up’ somewhere would allow us to be more carefree with our travel.

Why book: I guess the main reason we book sites is confidence. Confidence that you have a place to stay and you know what facilities you’re going to get when you arrive. Booking also has it’s downside – the time it takes to make the booking itself and then if you want to make a change there can sometimes be a cost as well as the time needed to change the booking.

Why not book: the key words here are flexibility, freedom and adventure. If you don’t like somewhere or the weather is awful, you can move somewhere nicer or with better weather. This freedom sounds wonderful, I’m not going to lie it’s great, however, it does come with the worry of “what if’s”. What if when we get to the site it’s no longer there, or it’s closed, or it’s full or….. All of these are valid, yet whilst we travelled for 54 days in France we only had one of these “what if’s” occur. It was really liberating not having to make all of the bookings or having to rebook if our plans changed.

The above probably simplifies our decision making strategy and it’s never about just one thing. When not booking, if any of the « what if’s » did happen then the availability of a backup becomes important and that really depends on where you are and when you’re travelling.

The backup plans: UK

In the UK, we book most of the places we stay at, whether that’s campsites, or now more usually a Certified Location (CL). This is mainly because in the UK there are not as many backup places for large motorhomes if the what if’s happen. The number of backups becomes even less when you’re looking for places to stay out of season. A lot of UK sites are only open for the summer months (some from April to October others only June/July and August). As full timers we need a place to stay all year round. 

The backup plans: France and EU
In France, and we believe in many other European countries that we’ve yet to experience, there are a lot more locations for motorhomers to stop at, whether campsites, Aires or Passions. These countries are also more geared up for motorhomes. This means in Europe we’re more up for not booking as there are more backups.

Backups and the type of pitches available. Because Beatrix is 6.5T we’re not always comfortable staying on grass pitches all year round. Lots of smaller UK Certified Locations (CL) only have grass pitches available. It may seem a rash statement that we aren’t comfortable staying on grass pitches so let me quantify that, if we wheel spin in Beatrix we could easily damage her gearbox and it’s expensive and time consuming to replace. So, if we consider staying on grass pitches we need to know: the ground underneath and the recent weather. These two things aren’t easy to know before you arrive at a site. In the UK we often phone the site owners to ask. The small site operators are equally keen in not having a 6.5T motorhome stuck in their field so they’re often pretty honest in their response and tell us if they think it will be a problem or not. We are fine camping on grass pitches in a dry summer and on grass that drains well however it’s something we have to consider.

What we learnt about not booking in France during the autumn of 2022

I mentioned that only one “what if” happened during our France Autumn tour. We went to one site on the Ile de Re and it was full. It would not normally have been full out of season, however they’d decided to do some renovation work on the site off season to get ready for next year. We ended up going to another site just up the road. We loved the back up so much we ended up staying an extra few nights, the weather was beautiful, sunshine and warm, the location was stunning – right next to the beach and it had all the facilities we could possibly need. This backup gave us the opportunity to do reconnaissance on where we could wild camp if we wanted to next year out of season.

Not being attached to a route or duration – i.e. the freedom I spoke about was very liberating. If we had booked our trip, we would have been “attached” to spending a lot more time in Normandy when the rain came and the temperature cooled. Instead, we were able to head south and find the sunshine and warmth which was great – all of this without having to cancel or amend any bookings. Liberating.

So, what’s the answer to the question to book or not to book?

Well, of course, it depends on you. Where and when will you be travelling? What’s your attitude to risk versus the ‘excitement’ of not knowing and having the flexibility to go wherever you want.

For us right now, we still mix up booking with not booking however, I enjoyed the freedom to follow the sun and my comfort with uncertainty and adventure has definitely been stretched.  

Hope you enjoyed the post. We’d love to hear how you travel and find the places you stay.

Thanks for reading

Sally, Toby and Merlin