Using Libert-t French toll road transponder
As a regular tourer in France for over twenty years, I like many others have toyed with the different ways of paying autoroute tolls. Paying by cash in the early days at a manned booth was always a pleasant experience because of the polite and friendly staff, however more and more automated booths and the resulting hanging out of the passenger window trying to feed cash into the note slot, turned the experience into a bit of a chore. In recent years and certainly whilst towing a caravan I invariably chose to pay by card at automated booths but still with the problem of trying to get the car passenger window near to the card slot, knowing that there was almost a foot of additional caravan width coming up behind ready to scrape along the concrete buffers.
I always looked with envy at the Libert-t automated booths and on a number of occasions looked at the Sanef website to see whether it would be possible to sign up for a automatic transponder. A rather complicated website and not always trusted my French translation put me off this option till this year, when I found that a UK based option was now available using a UK Sanef website and utilising a direct debit facility that debits your bank account for toll charges with one conversion charge. The set up process was very simple although there are admin set up charges and a refundable 20 euro charge for the transponder which was sent easliy through the post and fixed to the car windscreen using a stick on mount.
I used the system on my recent trip to France and it was absolutely fantastic. The real advantage being the ability to drive with caravan down the centre of the toll lane. The transponder beeps, the barrier lifts and you drive straight off with no fuss. My wife who also tows the van also pointed out that most of our arguments in the car usually were about how close either of us came to scraping the caravan side when negotiating toll booths. I have just received my first itemised bill with the debit for September usage to go out of my account at the start of November.
Well worth thinking about and probably worth the Caravan Club featuring in future club magazine.
Website is https://www.saneftolling.co.uk
Comments
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We're tempted to follow suit and get a tag! As you point out, many of the manned tollbooths have and are being replaced with machines - we have a motorhome and our cab is midway between the upper (no cash) slots and the lower cash or card slots. It gets
very difficult leaning down to feed in cash for small amounts.0 -
For the last three years we have used the toltickets transponder. It's much the same as liberte and is utterly brilliant. On one trip (the last tollbooth before Calais) there was an enormous queue. By the time we go to reading distance we realised we were in the wrong queue and slipped out of line to the auto toll. 15 kilometres further down the road the cars we we behind in the queue caught up with us. We have also found some of the auto tolls you don't even have to stop for - just maintain a sipped of 20 kph and you sail through. The website for this is
tolltickets.com ( German site with an English translation)
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This tear almost none of the tooll booths are manned! You draw up to the booth, put your ticket in the highlighted slot, the price is displayed and you put a Visa card in the next highlighted slot. The cost is charged to your card without putting in a pin
number. Some machines do accept cash. The card method is quite quick and on some routes only a few booths were open. We found that the bank charged us a fee for using the card. Note that if you loose your card anyone can use it to pay a toll!!0
