VAN-COMPARATOR Guide
Motorhome aire capacity: the median is just 10 pitches
Half of France's recorded aires have 10 pitches or fewer, and 684 offer at most 5. What the capacity distribution means for your summer stopovers.
The image of the 200-pitch seaside aire is misleading: the typical French motorhome aire is small. Across the 2,465 aires whose capacity is recorded in data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), July 2026 extract — 69% of the 3,575 aires in our directory — the median capacity is 10 pitches: half of all aires offer 10 bays or fewer.
The full capacity distribution
| Aire size | Number of aires | Share of recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 5 pitches or fewer | 684 | 28% |
| 10 pitches or fewer | 1,310 | 53% |
| 11 to 30 pitches | 742 | 30% |
| 31 to 49 pitches | 227 | 9% |
| 50 pitches or more | 186 | 7.5% |
| 100 pitches or more | 50 | 2% |
| 150 pitches or more | 16 | 0.6% |
In total, the 2,465 recorded aires add up to 46,924 pitches — very unevenly distributed: the 16 aires with 150 pitches or more weigh as much, on their own, as hundreds of small municipal halts.
A network of pockets, not giant car parks
These numbers reveal the true face of the French network: a very dense mesh of small village halts — often free, as our free vs paid analysis shows — punctuated by a handful of very large tourist aires, almost all on the coast. In between, the 11-to-30-pitch aires (742 sites) form the backbone of the managed networks, exemplified by Camping-Car Park and its median of 25 pitches.
Why it changes your summer stopovers
An 8-pitch aire by a river behaves nothing like a 180-pitch site with organised turnover: it fills up within a few arrivals. Research documents this seasonal pressure on RV infrastructure: the study by Caldicott, Scherrer and Jenkins published in 2014 in Annals of Leisure Research (Google Scholar page) describes, in the Australian case, reception capacity overwhelmed by a growing vehicle fleet and summer-concentrated demand — a mechanism every traveller recognises on small French aires in July and August.
Hence a practical tip — from experience, this one, not from the data: in high season, on a coveted small aire, aim to arrive mid-afternoon, before the evening wave; and always keep an identified fallback aire within half an hour. Our geographic hubs are built for exactly that: around Annecy, for instance, every aire is shown with its distance and known capacity.
The distribution also explains a paradox every summer traveller knows: France has more aires than any neighbouring country, yet “full” signs still appear. Total pitch numbers are dominated by a few giant sites in a few places, while the median halt — ten bays — is what you actually meet on the road. Density is national; capacity is local.
In praise of the small aire
These 1,310 aires with 10 pitches or fewer are no fallback option: they are the best part of motorhome travel the French way. A six-pitch halt behind the church of a village in the Lot delivers a level of calm and immersion no big aire can match — and it is exactly the fabric other European countries envy France for. Their fragility is real, though: sized for a handful of crews, they saturate quickly and depend on visitors’ good behaviour — clean use of the services, no awning sprawl, a purchase at the local shop — for municipalities to keep maintaining them. Outside July and August they become the traveller’s paradise again: that is when the French network of small aires can be toured without any booking constraint or schedule, from the first village to the last.
Check before you go
One last note on method: 1,110 aires have no recorded capacity — our pages then show “unknown” rather than an invented figure. Cross-check capacity with the services actually present, and for off-season stopover strategy — when the small aire becomes a quiet paradise again — our off-season rental guide completes the picture.
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