UK Campsite Finder Review

At the beginning of the month we posted an introductory post about our best place to find a campsite feature, which is a series of reviews about websites that help you to find a campsite. This, our third post in the series, is a review of camping site finder http://www.ukcampsitefinder.co.uk

http://www.ukcampsitefinder.co.uk

The www.ukcampsitefinder.co.uk website has fun graphics, including a VW and a computer with smiley faces! The layout is not overly cluttered and the site is easy to navigate.

Finding A Campsite

The search tree on left hand side of the page makes for easy advanced searching with lots of options. You can also search using map or list of counties.

There are plenty of campsites on their database, 3266 across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The locations of camp sites are displayed on a map, below which brief descriptions are listed. The facilities available at each camping site are displayed when you move your mouse over the word “Facilities” or you can click through to the Full Details page.

The Full Details page for each camping site shows a detailed list of facilities, opening times, number of pitches, address, phone number and location on an embedded Google map. For campsites with featured or premium listings it also includes e-mail, website, description and photos.

Campsite Facilities – Advanced Searching

Whilst the advanced search has a lot of useful selection criteria it seems to work using “or” rather than “and”, which reduces its usefulness. For example, I decided to search for campsites in Cumbria which produced 140 results. A good selection, but too many to choose from! Since I’ll be camping in a tent I decided to search again, this time selecting campsites with tent pitches. It’s no good to me if they only accept caravans. This returned 61 results. That’s better, but still a lot to choose from. So then I selected sites where dogs are welcome. This produced a list of 98 sites. That’s more than my search for sites with tent pitches. What I actually wanted to know was which sites had tent pitches AND welcome dogs, not which sites had tent pitches OR welcome dogs.

I went on to select ever more criteria that the campsite should include, but instead of whittling down the choices to bring up the ideal site the number of sites on the list either did not change or in some cases it increased!

In the advanced search there is a section called facilities nearby and leisure & entertainment. These could do with a little bit of rearrangement but this is only a minor detail.

There is a campsite user review, although I only found one campsite which actually had a user review.

Their is some advertising, but it is not too intrusive.

Some information about local area and attractions is shown, the amount depending upon each county. This could be improved with a few more attractions listed.

UK Campsite Finder – Summary

There is a big database of camping sites and the information is displayed clearly. My main criticism of this website is that the advanced search does not work properly. This is an important tool to help with your search and given that it is so prominent on the webisite, it really needs to be improved. If this is possible then ukcampsitefinder.co.uk would definitely be a great place to look for campsites.

Why not have a look at the other websites in this series?

• www.find-a-campsite.co.uk
• www.campingninja.com
• http://www.ukcampsitefinder.co.uk
• www.pitchup.com
• www.ukcampsite.co.uk

What do you think of http://www.ukcampsitefinder.co.uk? Click on comments below and have your say!