As you may be aware, the £ pound Sterling has had a rough ride in the latter months of 2008, dropping to just .98 Euro cents from a high of about 1.46 in 2007 and we are quite concerned about the state of the camping and mobile home holiday market in France and elsewhere in 2009, not especially because people won't be able to buy this type of holiday this year - in fact there is evidence that holidays abroad are cheaper than staying in the UK - but because of the balance between the £ pound Sterling against the Euro and the effect it will have on their budgets when they actually arrive in France, Spain or anywhere else in the Eurozone.
To make the point: pop into your campsite bar or any restaurant in France and you will be paying 4.50 Euros for a pint of what they call beer which equates to roughly £4.50 in English money right now and this is too much for me I'm afraid so it will have to be take aways from the supermarket for us this year. To help you make a decision as to whether you can afford to go to Europe this year we have written a page entitled Holiday Savings which we hope will be useful.
However, it seems that things may not be as bad as first thought. We have just had the latest interest rate cut in the first week of this year (2009) and it hasn't seemed to lower the value of the £ Pound still further as it has done on previous occasions, in fact it seems now that the Euro may be having it's own little problems as the market closed at 1.07 Euros to the Pound last night (12/01/2009), so our European holidays may yet be affordable.
When we were on holiday in France during the summer of (2007) we did a mini survey and asked quite a few holiday makers what they had searched for when buying their holiday. Of the ones who searched online most said that they searched for "camping France" or "camping holidays France" - yet they were all staying in mobile homes! So, it is as we have thought for some time; camping holidays and mobile home holidays are often confused to the point where they mean one and the same thing.
It was interesting to note that we had all the facilities we needed in our mobile home for more or less exactly the same money as some of our neighbours were paying to stay in tents, and as it was a rainy couple of weeks guess who came off best?
If you drill down the menu to your left you will find that in addition to the above sections we also have pages for self catering/self drive holidays to many different destinations, pages for mobile home and caravan repairs and maintenance, various insurance options including holiday travel insurance and mobile home insurance etc.
Yurt and Tipi camping seems to be the rage this year, and we have several pages devoted to those areas. We understand that some of the yurts even have heating! Not at all bad for what used to be a Mongolian tent (they had open fires).
We do not specialise in any one area of the camping, mobile homes holiday business and we have tried to provide information on a good cross section of businessess in each and every area, and as far as we are aware they are all legit. We hope you will spend some time on our site and really, seriously hope you will like what you come across inside.
Any comments, good, bad or indifferent please mail us at camp@campingmobilehomesholidays.co.uk