Two stories came out of Camping-Car Magazine this past week, two days apart, and together they tell you almost everything about where motorhome travel in Europe is heading.
First, on October 17, the magazine reported that Bayeux modernized its motorhome setup. If you have visited Normandy before, you might remember Bayeux had two older municipal areas for motorhomes. The town closed both of them and replaced them with a single 25-bay aire on rue de Verdun.
It is the new French template from top to bottom. There is no attendant. You drive up to a barrier with a camera that reads your license plate, pay by bank card only, and pull into a paved bay with electricity and water. The first 12 hours are one bracket, and after that it costs €14.40 per 24 hours. There is also a strict 8-meter length limit.
Two days earlier, on October 15, the same magazine covered a very different story just across the border: Luxembourg is finally funding its first official network of motorhome aires.
Unlike France, which has thousands of municipal stops, Luxembourg has never really had dedicated public aires. If you arrived in a motorhome, you either paid for a full campsite or tried your luck in a regular parking lot. This summer, the police had to step in after nine separate reports of illegal camping around the Haute-Sûre lake. Instead of just putting up more height barriers and "no camping" signs, the Ministry of the Economy launched a program called "Destination Camper Park(ing)" to help local towns build proper places for us to park.
There is one detail in the Luxembourg plan that caught my eye: the ministry will pay for the bays and the service points (water and waste), but they explicitly refused to fund public toilets at the aires, because of what it costs towns to clean and maintain them.
Le, Jolie (our toy poodle), and I have driven our motorhome through 24 European countries now, and that one detail about the toilets shows that somebody in Luxembourg actually talked to real motorhome owners before writing the rules.
People who don't travel in motorhomes often confuse a motorhome aire with a campsite. When a town thinks it needs to build a mini-campsite with shower blocks, toilets, and a reception desk, the budget gets huge, the project gets canceled, and the town puts up a 2-meter height bar instead.
Modern motorhomes already carry their own toilet, shower, water tank, and battery. When Le and I pull into a town for the night, we don't need a reception desk or a bathroom block. We need three things:
- A flat, legal spot where we know the police won't knock on our door at midnight.
- A drain for grey and black water, and a tap to fill our fresh water tank (plus 16-amp electricity in the winter).
- A safe path out of the lot so we can walk Jolie and walk into town for dinner or groceries.
Bayeux's new rules will annoy some people, especially anyone driving a liner over 8 meters or people who miss the old free parking lots. We miss the free lots sometimes too. Still, €14.40 for a flat bay with electricity within walking distance of the tapestry and the cathedral is a fair trade. You tap your card, the camera reads your plate, the barrier goes up, and you don't have to worry about a thing.
And when a town builds a clean, simple 25-bay lot like Bayeux, or a no-toilet service aire like Luxembourg is planning, the town gets that money right back. Motorhome travelers don't just use the parking lot in July and August. We travel in October, January, and March, when the hotels are half empty, and we spend our money in the local bakeries, pharmacies, and restaurants.
It is good to see Luxembourg figuring out that welcoming motorhomes is cheaper than chasing them away from the lake.