The website park4night.com is a site developed by three French guys to help people find somewhere to park their motorhome either for free, or very cheaply. The website is very clever in the way that it is being created by its users. What they have done is produced a smart phone application so that people can easily find places to stay using the GPS features of their smartphone. Similarly if somebody finds a place where they can park a motorhome, they can register that place with the site so that it can be enjoyed by others. The site is French-based but is available in different languages; French, English, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.
The site claims to have sites and places to park overnight in something like 22 different countries. However do bear in mind that most of these are in France. In fact at the time of writing there are 8903 places to park in France and after that it is Germany with 145. I was quite pleased to find that Switzerland has 120 places and Belgian has 114. The United Kingdom has a disappointing nine places to stay. But disappointments aside, this service is 100% free and in fact you don’t even need to register on the site if you just want to find the places to stay. Registration is of course necessary if you want to leave feedback or register a new place to stay for the night. Registration is free and the mobile smartphone apps are also free.
As a test I decided to look for some places to stay in the department of 66 area of France. This is in the Languedoc Rousillon area which is where it new usually drive through when travelling from the South of France towards Spain or Catalonia to be exact. This is an area I know well for thought it would be interesting to see which sites came first. Probably the easiest way to search for campsites using this website is to use the map, but also if you look down the bottom of the site there are some links which go straight to certain categories of places to park.
These are: Free car park for camper, Paying car park for campers, Private car park for campers, Picnic area, Rest area, Service area without parking, Camping
On the farm (farm, vineyard …), Off road (4×4), Parking day and night, Parking Day Only, Surrounded by nature.
As an example I tried the free car park for campervans link looking in the Languedoc Rousillon area. This isn’t totally obvious because it actually this the different areas of France by Department so you will need to know which department you are in. I knew that the area of Languedoc Rousillon that I was interested could be found under the link in the name of Pyrénées-Orientales. By clicking this link it brings up just eight places to park each with nothing more than just GPS coordinates and an address. Just looking at the list it isn’t totally obvious where they are:
- Canet-en-Roussillon, Camping Brasilia
- Les Angles, 27 Route du Pla del Mir
- Matemale, 110 Le Barrage
- Mont-Louis, 13-68 Boulevard Vauban
- Saint-Marsal, Le Village
- Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet, Place Saint Pierre
- Vernet-les-Bains, Boulevard Clemenceau
- Vernet-les-Bains, Chemin de la Laiterie
Although at first sight this might not seem to be useful, it really is better than nothing and I am assuming that were ever created the link in the first place managed to stop there for at least one night without any hassle. This sort of information could be very useful if you are driving late into the and just need somewhere to stop and get your head down for the night.
So overall I would recommend downloading the park for the night.com app on your smartphone and I would also recommend registering at the site too. Because the information is provided by users of the website some of the information is a bit sketchy, but for free you can’t complain. I can see this website maturing into something very useful and a great resource, but at the moment you just need to accept that it’s free and is much better than nothing.