How shall we spend our holidays? Where shall we go? What do we want to do? Where shall we stay?
The options used to be straightforward: a beach holiday or visiting beauty spots inland, relaxing or doing trips and touring, staying with friends and family or in hotels, apartments and on campsites in tents and caravans. Today more is involved and we can find many more alternatives.
This is especially true in France, where new ways of accommodating visitors that are a novel experience in themselves provide a good marketing tool for the regions and companies operating there.
In this sense the report published by the Virtual Tourism Observatory is interesting. In it a dossier from the French consultant, Coach Omnium, describes the diverse range of accommodation offered by campsites, in the main, but also hotels, in order to impress clients with the unusual and out- of- the- ordinary.
The choices are many and include treehouses, floating cabins on rivers and reservoirs, vintage caravans, variations on the tent like camping pods and even transparent inflatable bubbles….. The French website Le Réseau des Cabanes et Hébergements Insolites lists 750 in the “unusual” accommodation category in addition to 450 cabins and serves to promote as well as provide information of interest about everything from their construction to general guides.
A similar development is that of “glamping”, from the words “glamour” and “camping”, seen in the American web www.glamping.com which showcases worldwide sites, 21 of which are on Spanish soil, most of them in Andalucia.
On a recent visit to Cevennes National Park in France we saw how this type of accommodation has been integrated into existing resorts. Growth is held back in our country by legislative requirements.
Evenso we can point to some interesting pioneers in the field here: Cabanes als arbres, Enbauma’t, Forest Days (in the photo), both in the region of Solsonès, are well worth getting to know. Meanwhile, many traditional campsites are incorporating these new forms of accommodation.
Worthy of comment in the aforementioned report are the results of a survey highlighting that:
- Stays are generally short, mostly weekend breaks
- The natural surroundings come out on top as the prime attraction in selecting where to stay
- Of the choices available, most demand is for treehouses or floating cabins.
Artícle: DCB Tourism & Local Devolopment @DCBTurisme