Camping in the great outdoors: App shows top alternatives to overcrowded camping sites
Holidays with motorhomes or caravans are trendy. Travel restrictions in the corona pandemic have given the development another powerful boost. But not everyone wants to stand on densely packed campsites.
Labrador Tristan lies relaxed at the feet of its owner and panted away the early summer heat in the shade of the trees. The veteran dog has already got used to the large birds that strut across the meadow just a few meters away. “I was looking for peace and seclusion. I found that – and a sight that you would not have expected here,” says the 38-year-old IT programmer Hendrik, petting his dog’s dark fur.
The IT specialist from Saxony stopped in his mobile home at the Riederfeld ostrich farm in Lübz, Mecklenburg. From his comfortable deck chair he can watch the hustle and bustle of the ostriches in the paddock surrounded by high fences. Like Hendrik, more and more travelers with motorhomes and caravans are using offers from farms, wineries or animal farms to make a short stop there.
When planning a route, many use the suggestions of the App “Landvergnügen” back, a nationwide active parking space broker. “Our travel and enjoyment guide is regularly sold out. This year, despite the increased circulation, well before the start of the season,” reports managing director Ole Schnack.
Initially, the catalog listed almost 230 companies that offer travelers with mobile homes free parking spaces for one night. In return, the guests are expected to go shopping in the farm shop or in the wine shop. In this way, a host network was created, which now includes around 1,300 farms with a wide variety of orientations nationwide.
Herbert and Sabine Wisböck also observe the hustle and bustle of the freshly shorn llama-like animals on an alpaca farm. You made a stopover in Gerbstedt, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, on your return journey to Bavaria with your self-converted motorhome. You have booked your pitch in the great outdoors through the paid provider “Alpaca-Camping”.
“It is the satisfaction and tranquility that you can feel here. You can switch off from work and enjoy the sunset in the evening,” said Herbert Wisböck. Alexandra Scheffler offers her meadow as a parking space on around 18 hectares – right next to the alpaca farm on a hill with a sweeping view of forests and arable land.
The concept is similar to that of “Landvergnügen”: Instead of shopping in the farm shop, guests pay a fixed price per night. “We want to offer campers a wonderful experience of being able to spend the night outside in the great outdoors and at the same time hosts can earn something for their unused space,” said one of the founders of the platform Dominik Quambusch. Around 700 places are offered across Germany.
The German Tourism Association sees this development with some benevolence. “The offer will be wider. And we do not see any competition to the conventional campsites. The places have a good booking situation and the operators are really busy”, stated Association President Reinhard Meyer. Around 36 million overnight stays are counted on the courses every year, and the trend is rising.
Monika Helfrich, who together with her husband has built an ostrich farm on the flat land between Schwerin and Waren an der Müritz, offers parking spaces at the paddocks. Around 100 animals, from chicks to veteran roosters, cavort on the spacious grounds in various enclosures.
Day-trippers from hotels in the lake district in particular come to visit more often in summer to admire the ratites, which can be up to 2.5 meters tall, and to shop in the farm shop. Caravan travelers were initially rather the exception, until the previous year the corona pandemic brought their own homeland increasingly into the focus of German travelers. “We thought it would overwhelm us,” remembers Monika Helfrich of the great popularity in summer 2020.
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In Oberheimbach am Rhein in Rhineland-Palatinate, winemaker Tobias Korn also gives caravan travelers space to stay overnight. “We also have two parking spaces for smaller vehicles right in the vineyard. People don’t want to leave,” says Korn. With the parking spaces, visitors would also be lured into places that tourists usually pass by.
“It is mainly townspeople who discover courtyard hopping for themselves or who simply go on a discovery tour at the weekend,” says Ole Schnack of “Landvergnügen”. The restrictions during the corona pandemic, in which travel abroad was barely possible for a long time, would have intensified the trend to travel in the country. “Without Corona I would be in Norway now,” says computer scientist Hendrik as confirmation.
And the Bavarian couple on the alpaca farm, who have been camping for 30 to 40 years and have traveled all over the world from Scandinavia to Italy, originally had other plans: “We actually always postponed going on vacation in Germany because we said we can do that when we’re older, “says Sabine Wisböck. Due to Corona, they are traveling much more in Germany, “because we would normally be in Namibia now,” added Herbert Wisböck.
According to the Caravaning Industrie Verband e. V. has been increasing steadily for years. The association refers to surveys by the market research institute GfK, according to which almost every fourth adult in Germany is considering going on a caravanning holiday in the next five years. The number of new registrations is increasing, only slowed down by manufacturers’ delivery bottlenecks. According to the Federal Motor Transport Authority, around 76,000 mobile homes were registered in Germany in 2020, an increase of over 40 percent over the previous year.
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