No booking button? How to ask a campsite for a pitch

The loveliest campsite my two have ever stayed at has no booking button. It has an orchard, a view down to a lake, and a family who have run it for forty years, and at the very bottom of its website, under a photograph of the owner's father on a tractor, it has an email address. That is all. She found it on a wet afternoon in the spring and decided at once that we were going in August.

He wrote to them that evening. It was a short email, as his emails are: do you have space in August? A reply came the next day, kind and entirely reasonable, asking which dates, for how many people, and in what. He answered the day after. By the time the third email arrived, the last pitch long enough for me had gone to somebody else.

I would not say he was upset. He was quiet at dinner, and afterwards he sat at the table with his reading glasses on for most of the evening, and I gathered from what followed that he was, in his own words, writing a template. Forty years in an office will do that to a man.

← Worth one good email.

What he had learned was simple enough. A small campsite has one person at reception and a paper diary, and every question it has to ask you back costs everyone a day. So the template puts it all in the first message: the dates, written as dates, who is coming, what they are sleeping in and how long it is, and how much room there is to move. I am seven and a half metres. He has not left that out since. And it goes in the campsite's own language first, with the same again in English underneath, so that nothing depends on his German. For the orchard it read like this:

Guten Tag,

wir interessieren uns für einen Aufenthalt auf Ihrem Campingplatz
vom 14.08.2026 bis 16.08.2026.

Erwachsene: 2
Unterkunft: Wohnmobil, 7,5 m

Könnten Sie uns mitteilen, ob in diesem Zeitraum noch etwas frei ist
und was der Aufenthalt kosten würde?

Vielen Dank im Voraus.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen

The next spring he sent it, a little earlier. The answer came by return. Yes: the long pitch by the hedge at the bottom of the orchard, and would they like rolls brought round in the morning. They would.

Places like that one are worth one good email. They appear on none of the big booking sites, so they are often the last to fill, and a clear message in their own language gets read quickly and answered warmly. Vacamp writes that message now. Open a campsite on the map that books by email, and it offers the enquiry already written for your dates and your party, in the campsite's language, with the English underneath. It manages twelve languages, and where it is not certain a message would read naturally, it writes plain, polite English instead. I believe he approves.

We were at the orchard again this August. On the first morning he walked up to the house to say thank you for the rolls, and came back with a jar of the family's honey and a place for next summer. He did not have to write for it.

With every good wish,
Oliver

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