CCP - Booking Ahead and Arrival Time (10 Viewers)

[DBK]

I know not many use the booking service you can get with Camping-Car Parks (CCP) not least because it costs getting on for €30 a year to be able to use the service. But we've used it occasionally and did at the start of this trip to make sure we could get on the aire at Cléder near Roscoff after arriving on the overnight ferry from Plymouth. The reason for making the booking is this is a popular aire at times and is sometimes full.

So what's this Thread about? The issue is when you book a CCP aire using their app the booking is shown as starting at 12:00 on the first day and ending at 12:00 on the last day. So what happens if you arrive before 12:00?

I had thought that your stay would simply start at your actual arrival time which of course means you must leave before the same time on your last day.

This is not what happened. We arrived at 10:00 on the first day and left on the last day just before 10:00. As you have to pay in advance when making a booking I assumed there would be no additional charge on my account but there was a charge made for €6.

Looking in the app at the list of stays revealed the €6 was the 5 hour stay charge. With CCP you can visit an aire for up to five hours and be charged a lower rate. Once you stay over 5 hours you are then charged the 24 hour rate.

What they did was was charge us at the 5 hour rate for the two hours between our arrival time at 10:00 and the start of the booking at 12:00.

This is not a complaint but I think it is worth knowing if you do make a CCP booking and arrive before 12:00 then expect to be charged at the 5 hour rate for the aire.

 

[DavidG58]

Interesting

So if you don’t use the more expensive prebooked option you would be £6 better off for that stop plus the £30 you haven’t paid for the ‘upgrade’

Presuming they would let you in before 12

 

[Nigel Crompton]

Yes, it's a pain and I hope that they can improve the flexibilty in the future. Have you had a moan at them? We did....

I can't see how they can improve the situation in your case tho'; they don't know what time you'll arrive so how do they reserve a place other than by selecting an arbitrary start time for your arrival.

On the other hand, having made a booking and, for eg after a long day, not arriving until 2100hrs then it must be possible (if they know there's going to be space) to extend the stay to 24hrs from entry, if required. They accepted this as a valid argument and has (allegedly) been put on a 'wish list' for the software developers.

 

[Nigel Crompton]

Presuming they would let you in before 12

And if there's space, which in our case is the raison d'être for booking in the first place ...

 

[DavidG58]

The nice thing is they ‘only’ charged the short stay option not an extra night

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[DBK]

The nice thing is they ‘only’ charged the short stay option not an extra night

I guess most folk won't fall into this trap but arriving on an overnight ferry meant we were at the entrance to the aire quite early. Typically we tend to arrive at aires around 12:30 having driven a couple of hours in the morning.

 

[Hawkstone]

We made the same mistake at Mont Saint Michel, however the card machine had failed and they had a lovely woman on the barrier and she said just park up for 40 minutes and then we could enter ar 12. If she hadn’t been there we would have been charged the €6 I guess. I will definitely bear this in mind but it would nice to have a little more flexibility.