The Club’s Touring France Book/Errors!
On my way home from Spain recently I was planning to stay at Camping Gites du Stade in Oloron-Ste-Marie. However, in the maps page at the back of the Touring France book it states this site is “All Year”, but in the site listing it states “closes 30 Sep. I emailed The Club and it was confirmed that it closes at the end of Sep. But I was chatting to someone in Albarracín who was going there and he stated it was all year, and confirmed this with his ACSI book.
In fact, this was a Municpal site until 2016 but was privatised in 2017. It is now called Camping Pyrenees Nature and is open all year.
The site at Pons in the Charente Maritime area is also shown in the map section to be all year and closing 30 Sep in the listing. I have not checked the true status of this one yet, but will inform the Overseas Section.
BillC
Comments
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How prescient your opening post is.
I've been doing some prep work for a trip to North East Spain in March next year.I've done it before and know my normal stopping off points but thought that this time we would take the ferry to St.Malo to visit my brother who lives nearby and then head down from there.
The touring guide has numerous mistakes and misinformation in it and it's a very poor show. There are sites that are shown as open all year which aren't and vis-versa. For example, they show a site at St.Maixent L'Ecole, near Niort, as being open all year. It isn't. They then show 2 sites at Caussade just north of Toulouse, as not open all year on the map, that is not in red, but do show them with an open all year sign when looked in the description pages. Confused?
I've been cross referencing sites with UK Campsites better maps and info and also ACSI guides.
Who edits these guides? If anyone was juts relying on them then they are not getting the full information.
The best thing to do is to mistrust what they say about opening times and double check other sources.
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Who edits the guides? Well it used to be a certain Rowena.
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I thought that the entries were submitted by members. As there are thousands I can’t imagine any way that the Club is going to factually check each one. That would be totally impractical.
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It's not the members who draw the maps and allocate the red or black dots indicating time span that campsite is open. This is done by a member of staff extrapolating the information given by the member so you would expect them to match. Simple editing job.
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Yes we too are getting very cautious about site dates, we've had at least 2 sites on the last 2 trips this year that have been wrong.
We now have got into the habit of phoning ahead just to make sure its open if its getting to the end of the season.
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I was indeed the editor of the 2012 guides and loved working on them. I still use them myself and it was very handy on a recent trip to France via Dover/Calais crossing.
The site info is provided to us by members who report on the sites. I will let the team know Camping Gites du Stade needs to be corrected for the next edition. For any other errors/updates can you please report these here camc.com/europereport
It's also worth noting on each site entry you can see what year the details were last updated. As such any that were a few years ago, it's definitely worth double checking as may well have changed.
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We always use a combination of Archie's GPS data (loaded into a custom made database), with the CC book for further information and if we plan a long stay, Streetview to get a better impression. It generally works.
I wouldn't rely on a single source of information and as said the CC book depends on being updated by members.
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