Product Description

This is a guide to the camping and caravanning sites of France. Each site featured has been visited by Michelin inspectors and they give information on the services and amenities available.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #300767 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-05
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 610 pages

Customer Reviews

A slight problem
The book arrived with the usual Amazon efficiency.However opening the book, I quickly found a few problems with the book if like me your knowledge of foreign languages is limited.Whilst the "How to use" section is in English,all the site information is in French including the directions to the sites.It also quickly becomes apparent that to get the best from the guide you need a Michelin road atlas.The final problem I had was the layout of the sites in that they were listed alphabetically which made it harder to find a particular province
The good points were that there were over 3000 sites to choose from suiting every taste and budget.

Pros and Cons.
I believe there are about 11,000 campsites in France and the one thing in favour of this guide is that it includes roughly a third of them. No other guide has even as much as a tenth ( AA is 450, Rogers about 600, "yellow" International about 800 ).
Of the "others" the Rogers is by far the best for clear detail.
Problems with Michelin are first, arrangement; which unlike all others is not by region so as to bring nearby campsites together in the guide, but irrationally by alphabetical name of nominally nearest town or village. This is tiresome and puts campsites that are geographically adjacent at arbitrarily widely separated points in the book. It also means seeking a campsite requires looking up several names of every nearby town or village.
Secondly the information, though detailed, is very tersely presented and needs some practice in interpretation. Pricing is only partly detailed in comparison to Rogers' and there is no real indication of site layout or environment as in Rogers.
So for a guide with minimum adequate detail, listing 4 to six times as many sites as the best alternatives, this is the one.
Otherwise a pre-selected choice of far fewer sites but with fulsome description and detailed pricing is best provided in Alain Rogers' guide.

Confused
I ordered the guide so that I could use if for a recent Holiday in Normandy and Brittany. First of all the guide is in French with an English introduction, but that’s
Fine as even I can read enough French to understand it. The information given for each site is good in so much as it lists every thing the site has, however quality doesn’t seem to have been assessed and the star rating system (in the guides case how many mountains it has?) is wildly inaccurate.
One site we stayed on which had a good rating only had one toilet block, which was on the other side of a main road! Another site we stayed on had a low rating but was (although small) excellent. Another site had loads of pitches but most weren’t level and the one we did pick (in the dark) was so saturated that our camper van sunk into it and had to be towed out with a four-wheel drive!
Another problem with the guide is that it’s difficult to look up sites. There is a map at the start of each section with all the sites marked on it. In the text each area is subdivided into departments and the sites are arranged in alphabetical order. In order to find a site you have to look at the map work out which department its in and then thumb through to find that department in the text and then thumb through some more to find the site within the department. Occasionally there are smaller maps but the sites marked on theses often aren’t on the same page as the map.
In the end we used the guide only to work out which sites were still open (we went camping in October) and when we got to a site we tried to inspect it first before staying. This isn’t something you should have to do with a good guide.
To sum up the Michelin guide has the makings of a good guide but it desperately needs its site inspections reviewing and its layout up dating.

P.S. This assessment is only based on about 6 sites visited so it may be I was just unlucky.