What do foreign campervan travellers expect from a campsite in Türkiye?
Campervan and motorhome guests from Europe expect information in English, online booking, card payment, an accurate location pin and a waste water point. Simple ways to offer all of them.
Teknovan Editorial Team ·
Motorhomes and caravans with foreign number plates also turn up at campsites on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, especially in spring and autumn, when people avoid the summer crowds. According to figures from the Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (Ministry of Culture and Tourism), Türkiye welcomed 63,941,000 visitors in total in 2025. There's no official statistic on how many of them came by campervan, but for a small campsite even a handful of foreign crews can fill the quietest weeks of the season.
These guests have usually grown up with Europe's camping culture and know what they want. What they expect isn't luxury, it's predictability. Below are five basic expectations, with a simple step for each.
1. Booking should be possible online
According to a May 2026 statement from VIR, Germany's association of online travel sellers, based on the FUR study, 72 per cent of German camping holidays are now booked entirely online. In 2019 around 30 per cent of camping holidays were arranged entirely the traditional way. Today that figure has dropped to 10 per cent.
Not every camper coming to Türkiye is German, of course, but the habit is similar. A guest who can't ring up and ask "do you have space?" in Turkish will choose a site where they can see the calendar and book with a click. The simple step:
- Put your availability calendar online and state the price clearly.
- Have an English version of your booking confirmation.
- Confirm instantly instead of "send us a message and we'll get back to you". A camper on the road has no time to wait a day.
We covered the general benefits of online booking separately in the benefits of online booking for campsites.
2. Information should be in English, and short
You don't need perfect English. What you need are short, accurate sentences. What a foreign guest wants to know is nearly always the same:
| Topic | One line in the listing |
|---|---|
| Pitch | Pitch size, shade, ground (gravel, grass, sand) |
| Electricity | Electricity yes/no, amperage, plug type |
| Water | Drinking water tap, shower, hot water hours |
| Waste | Grey water drain, chemical toilet disposal point |
| Rules | Quiet hours, dogs, campfires |
| Getting around | Nearest market, bus stop, beach distance |
Fill this table in with your own details and add it to your listing and confirmation message. Keep a printed, one-page information card in English at the gate as well, with the Wi-Fi password, an emergency number and the quiet hours on it.
3. Card payments should be accepted
According to the European Central Bank's 2024 SPACE study, 55 per cent of consumers in the euro area prefer to pay in shops by card or other non-cash methods, while 22 per cent prefer cash. In the same study, cash was used in 52 per cent of transactions at the point of sale, down from 59 per cent in 2022.
So some guests carry cash, but most expect to pay by card. Telling a guest who has driven a long way, with only a little Turkish lira (TL) on them, "cash only" means a 15-kilometre trip to the nearest cash machine.
- Get a card terminal or an online payment link.
- Take the deposit online when they book and collect the rest by card at the gate.
- Say in the listing which payment methods you accept, so there are no surprises on arrival.
4. The location pin should show the gate
A foreign guest trusts the map, not your sentences, for directions. If the pin is wrong, they get lost on a village road that's hard to describe in another language.
- Move the pin on your business listing to right in front of the gate.
- If your land has no address, use the Plus Code feature in Google Maps. According to Google, this short code of letters and numbers works as an address for places without a street address and can be shared like a phone number. When sharing the short code, you also need to add the name of the town or area.
- Put the coordinates and the Plus Code in the confirmation message, and add important warnings for campervans (narrow gate, steep ramp, low branches) in English.
We explained in detail how to time pre-arrival messages and how to write directions for campervans in don't let campervan guests get stuck at the gate.
5. There should be a water and waste point
For guests travelling by motorhome or caravan, filling up with fresh water and emptying waste is as basic as a shower. There are three separate things here, and they mustn't be mixed up:
- Fresh water: a drinking water tap and an outlet you can attach a hose to for filling the tank.
- Grey water: water from the sink and shower. Often a grated drain the vehicle can drive over and empty into is enough.
- Black water: the contents of a cassette toilet. This needs a separate chemical toilet disposal point. As the camping guide camping.info stresses, black water should never be poured into a grey water drain.
It also matters that the fresh water tap and the cassette rinsing point are separate. If the hose used to rinse toilet cassettes is also used to fill drinking water tanks, an experienced camper will notice, and will most likely mention it in a review. Before you build these points, check with your belediye (municipality) where the waste water should be connected.
Show your points in the listing and on the map. A line reading "Service point: fresh water, grey water, chemical toilet disposal" is exactly what a foreign camper is looking for.
Small touches that work
- A "Welcome" sign at the gate and a sketch map showing pitch numbers.
- A page showing where the nearest shop, pharmacy and hospital are.
- A channel where you can message easily with a translation app (WhatsApp is familiar to many guests).
- A short thank-you in English and a review link when they leave. Reviews from foreign guests help the next foreign guests decide. On asking for reviews, see how to ask for campsite reviews.
What a campsite in Türkiye can take from this
- Open up your calendar, take bookings and deposits online, and prepare the confirmation message in English too.
- Add a short information section in English, as a table, to your listing.
- Accept card payments and say so in the listing.
- Move the pin to the gate, and add the Plus Code and coordinates to the confirmation message.
- Set up separate fresh water, grey water and chemical toilet points, and show them in the listing.
Foreign guests say out loud what local guests expect too. Every change made for them also improves the guest experience in general. We looked at that bigger picture in why guest experience is a campsite's most valuable asset.
teknovan.io is software that helps campsites manage their calendar, online deposits and English confirmation messages in one place.
Sources
- Record tourism revenue in 2025, Minister Ersoy: more than 63 million visitors, Sabah
- Pressemitteilung Campingurlaub, VIR (May 2026)
- Study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE) 2024, European Central Bank
- No address? No problem. Share your location using Plus Codes, Google
- What is the difference between grey water and black water?, camping.info
Image credits
Photos illustrate the region; they are not photos of the campsites themselves.
- Gümüldür: BIG-K006, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
