Pitch Prices 2018

It is somewhat. It has cost me £1200 for 48 nights away in the UK this year. (unable to travel abroad for health reasons) This works out at around £25 a night. Not sure if anyone would disagree with this figure but I reckon it costs me an extra £500 (crossing, insurance, tolls) to get to Europe which I have not spent this year. If I were to remove the £500 from what I spent in the UK the nightly cost would be nearer £14 a night. So trying to compare is not really a level playing field. Also if you venture further afield to the likes of Germany and Italy sites costs, even with ACSI,by the time you have added the extras  are in some cases much higher than in France. What one has to remember about France is that without the discount schemes and their low prices the majority of French sites would be empty outside of July and August as there is not the demand. Even out of the main season Club sites in particular run at fairly full levels so the demand is there so its very much a supply and demand situation.

David

David is deducting a notional cost for the ferry and RP from his UK site fees as he saved that amount by not going abroad.

But that is why I didn't include fuel and spending in my ballpark figures because I would be spending that money whether I was in the UK or abroad. In the UK we tend not to travel such long distances so despite the cheaper fuel abroad it works out even stevens. To get to Europe I need to pay for a crossing and I need insurance. I accept that some tolls are discretional but we often prefer to pay those if it makes getting from A to B easier. 

David

of course its valid (depending on where you live) to compare prices abroad....

compare a scottish trip to (say) La Rochelle....

from the south, where we live, a trip to north of Scotland (for perhaps the NC 500) would take us 12 hrs and 674 miles

to La Rochelle the time is 9 hrs and the distance 438 miles.

at around 26-28 mpg thats a saving of £50 or so on fuel alone.

throw in a cheap dover-calais ferry (£60) and the costs are pretty much the same.

from then on, its all gravy....cheaper sites, food, fuel.

yes, if you live north of Manchester, then the figures might just be a tiny bit harder to justify, but throw in the different weather and France becomes a bargain.....IMHO, of course....

from Buckinghamshire, i wpuld have thought that DK would find costs very similar to a scottish trip.

go less distance north and still a caparison to (say) Brittany stands up.

for us, taking a trip to Scotland (we would love to go again) requires as hefty a financial commitment as touring France....so far, including the differences in weather, we havent been able to commit...four or five weeks of crap weather would be 'my fault'..... 

Certainly down to the Loire off season, I would agree BB. Our trip, including RP, probably worked out a similar cost to the far north of Scotland. 

However, it didn't actually as we choose to go BF to St Malo both ways, with nice cabins and meals. However, as you said cheap crossings are available. That bit is just down to choice.

Alan, an earlier post suggested that comparing (say) a french vanning break to a UK one 'wasnt valid' for cost reasons......i merely pointed out that its perfectly valid to do so.

what i didnt do in my post (bearing in mind the title of the thread) was to comment on the CC pitch prices....it wasnt necessary to make my point.

however, as youve asked me....i think they were 'at the top end' of the price scale and have cemented that position with this latest round of increases...

some say that they are 'clean' and this seems to be their primary 'feature' for those who insist on using them.

pretty much all providers can manage clean toilets these days..its the customers who make them dirty....does a rigid cleaning timetable do anything for this.....no, not really...

location, value, might come before this as a reason to stay somewhere, it does for us...

quotes of £35-£40 a night wont have us running in their direction.

many posts have hinted that customers will be using CC sites less and less, and price is obviously a factor...

If only my pension was keeping up with inflation!

The basic State pension has increased well, but the same cannot be said for the graduated/SERPS/whatever bit, or many employers pensions.

With the latter, only that earned since sometime in the 1990s has to be linked to inflation in some way, the rest is at the employer scheme's discretion.

As a result, since retirement 10 years back, my overall pension income has only gone up by around 1% per annum, add in miserable rates on savings over the same period and the picture is not good.

Comparing July/August prices is irrelevant as far as we are concerned as we do not go away then.  There are more price bands these days on a lot of the CAMC sites,  often making  September only very slightly less expensive than August for example.