VAN-COMPARATOR Guide
Camping-Car Park: how big France's leading aire network really is
199 aires carrying the network's name in OpenStreetMap, a median capacity of 25 pitches — 2.5 times the national median — and near-systematic services: France's top aire operator, examined through data.
You cannot tour France in a motorhome without meeting the red barriers of Camping-Car Park, the country’s leading managed-aire network. How much does it actually weigh in the French network? Among the 3,575 aires in the data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), July 2026 extract behind our directory, we isolated the 199 aires carrying the network’s name. An important methodological note: this count relies on the names entered by OpenStreetMap contributors — the actual network claims more sites, not all of which are (yet) named as such in the database. Our figures therefore describe the Camping-Car Park aires visible in OSM, not the full commercial network.
The network in four numbers
| Indicator | Camping-Car Park aires (OSM) | Whole French network |
|---|---|---|
| Aires recorded | 199 (5.6% of the total) | 3,575 |
| Median capacity | 25 pitches (187 recorded) | 10 pitches (2,465 recorded) |
| Cumulative pitches | 6,354 (across the 187 recorded) | 46,924 (across the 2,465 recorded) |
| Paid aires | 194 of 197 recorded (98%) | 1,433 of 3,366 (43%) |
Aires 2.5 times larger than the median
The median capacity of a network aire is 25 pitches, against 10 for the French network as a whole — two and a half times more. The business model explains it: an automatic barrier, service terminals and remote supervision cannot be amortised over five bays. The network’s largest aire visible in OSM is Mont Saint-Michel (180 pitches, France’s 7th largest), ahead of Noirmoutier-en-l’Île (142), Hirel, facing the bay of Mont Saint-Michel (140), and Villefranche-sur-Saône, in Beaujolais (128).
Near-systematic services
Where the network stands out most is equipment. Among Camping-Car Park aires with services recorded in OSM: water is present on 155 of 156 aires, disposal on 176 of 178, and electricity — the most discriminating service in the French network, present on just 67% of aires overall — on 182 of 190 aires, i.e. 96%. The contrast with the national average is detailed in our water, electricity, disposal analysis.
The price of standardisation
The logical counterpart: 98% of the network’s aires charge (194 of 197 recorded), while 57% of French aires remain free — see our free vs paid article. It is the French illustration of a deeper movement documented by tourism research: in their critical review of camping research published in 2014 in the Journal of Vacation Marketing (Google Scholar page), Brooker and Joppe highlight the growing professionalisation and segmentation of outdoor hospitality, where standardised networks coexist with a basic municipal or community offer.
What the OpenStreetMap data does not say
Two limits worth keeping in mind. First, OSM records neither the network’s actual prices nor its booking system: our figures describe the infrastructure (capacity, services, paid status), not the rates — for those, the operator’s own site is the reference. Second, the “199 aires” perimeter depends on how contributors name places: an aire taken over by the network whose OSM name has not been updated escapes the count, and the gap with the operator’s claimed commercial figure is mostly explained by that naming lag. That is the rule of the open-data game: what you lose in commercial exhaustiveness, you gain in verifiability — every aire in our count can be inspected, field by field, in the public database.
What it means for your route
The Camping-Car Park network means predictability: electricity almost guaranteed, maintained services, year-round opening — in exchange for a paid overnight rate. The other 3,376 aires cover the rest of the spectrum, from the free municipal halt to the upmarket private aire. Our geographic hubs, such as aires around Nantes, show both worlds side by side, with known services and pricing status.
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