Book review: Camperstop Europe 2015

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for this review. I did not receive any payment and was not required to write a positive review.

There are lots of country-specific motorhome stopover guides, but if you’re planning a long tour — or to regularly visit different countries — your book collection can get a little large.

The exception to this rule is Camperstop Europe — an English language guide published by Dutch firm Facile Media, which covers all of the popular motorhome destinations in Western Europe.

As far as I know, there is no real competitor to Camperstop, except perhaps the German language Reise Mobil Bordatlas, which has fewer locations outside Germany and is, of course, in German (although this isn’t a big problem).

What’s in Camperstop Europe?

The latest Camperstop edition, Camperstop Europe 2015, went on sale recently and includes details of 8,033 motorhome stopovers in 15 European countries. Of these, 6,072 stopovers have pictures, and 415 are new in this edition.

As usual with this type of guide, there is a graphic key which is used to indicate which facilities are available at each stopover. All the usual services — grey water disposal, chemical toilet dispoal, fresh water and so on — are included. In addition to this, each stopover listing includes information such as the number of motorhome spaces, seasonal opening dates, prices and local facilities and attractions.

Locations are generally inspected annually, so all of the information should be quite accurate. The locations are generally either official aires/stopovers, or places where overnight motorhome parking is either permitted or tolerated. Again, this is indicated by a graphical key.

GPS coordinates are included for each location, along with a basic address. The front section of the book contains a series of maps showing all of the locations, along with an index listing the page number for each stopover.

If you want the convenience of adding all of these locations to your sat nav, Facile offers GPS data sets for most popular models of sat nav — each dataset costs €3.25. Each data set includes all GPS POIs for at least one country, sometimes more (e.g. Spain/Portugal are sold as one).

Our verdict:

Camperstop Europe is a great book without any real competition for UK motorhomers. Other individual books may sometimes offer more detail for a single country, but if you want a simple and reliable way to find stopover locations throughout Europe, then this is it.

At about £25 per copy, Camperstop will rapidly pay for itself. It’s available direct from Facile Media, or from various other outlets, including Vicarious Books in the UK, and of course Amazon.