Not on the list
The places we looked at closely and left off the list, and the rule that excluded each one. Every entry names a rule, not a fault.
Every curated guide claims a hit rate. The best-known one in this category inspects every place it lists, says only twenty per cent make the cut, and does not publish the other eighty. A number nobody can check is not evidence of curation. It is a sentence about curation.
So here is ours, as the research files recorded it. Nothing below is a verdict on a business. Every entry states the rule that excluded a place — one per operator, smaller and independent over the big groups, the register this site is written in — and several of them are excellent at exactly the thing we are not for. Where a run could not put its reason as a rule, the entry is not on this page.
Cut, and the rule that cut it
France
Researched August 2026. 20 kept, 3 cut.
- Huttopia
- Cut on the smaller-boutique-over-big-companies rule. Dozens of sites across Europe; listing the network breaks one-per-operator, and the site links to places, not brands.
- Camping Indigo
- Cut for the same reason as Huttopia.
- Camping du Letty, Bénodet
- Genuinely unusual — five stars and no mobile homes at all — but at that scale it is the wrong register for us.
Held back, not turned down
A reserve met the standard and lost its slot. Twenty is the ceiling for a country and the list is spread deliberately across its regions, which means the second good site in a region is competing with the first one rather than with the standard. These came closest, and go on the list the day the entry above them stops earning it.
- Camping La Rivière d'Argent, Brittany
- Good, bio-sourced accommodation, working towards Clef Verte. Held back only because Au Vieux Moulin already covers Finistère.
- Camping Les Volcans, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
- 59 pitches in the Chaîne des Puys UNESCO area, Clef Verte 2024. Held back because CosyCamp is the stronger Auvergne entry.
Why this page is short
Because it is the record, not the total. Choosing twenty from a country means turning places away every time. What we have not done until now is write down which, at the moment we did it.
The Ireland round ran without the field, so its research file kept the shortlist and no note of the rest. Britain, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden predate the research file in its current shape, and none of them left a record of what was turned away. Those rounds cut places. Reconstructing the names now, from memory, would produce something that looks like evidence and is not — which is the failure this page exists to be the opposite of.
Every round from here writes them down as it goes. The discovery script puts the field in the file it generates, so a run that turns something away has somewhere to say so, and a run that turns nothing away has to leave an empty list behind and mean it.
If you run a place on this page
The rules are published in full on How we choose, and they change — a place cut on one place per operator is a candidate again the moment we are choosing between operators rather than within one. If you think a rule has been misapplied to you, or that something here reads as more than a rule, write to hello@cabinsandcamping.com and it gets corrected or removed.