Germany's Motorhome Pitches: All 781 We Hold, and What They Actually Tell You

Germany has thousands of motorhome pitches. Our register holds 781 of them, and they are the best-documented property class in the entire German catalogue: 559 carry a photograph, 715 a telephone number, 702 a website. The German average is 26% photographed and 37% telephoned. Not one of the 781 can be booked through any aggregator — including this one — which is exactly why the phone number matters more than the picture.

Where these numbers come from. The German National Tourist Board publishes accommodation records collected by the regional tourism boards as open data. We hold 44,413 active German records. The 781 below are the rows filed as a Wohnmobilstellplatz in at least one of three separate fields — and the phrase “at least one of three” is doing a great deal of work, which is the first section. Every figure here was re-derived on 17 August 2026 and is quoted with the denominator it was calculated on.

781 is a decision, not a measurement

There is no single field in this register that says “this is a motorhome pitch”. There are three, they overlap imperfectly, and each one gives a different answer. The property-type field is the strictest and the category list is the loosest; the amenity tokens catch a different set again, mostly campsites and farms that happen to take motorhomes.

So the honest headline is a range, not a number. A reader who filters a booking site on "motorhome pitch" is filtering one of these definitions without being told which. We publish the union, we say so, and we would not defend 781 as a count of German motorhome pitches — Germany has far more. It is a count of what one open register passed through, and the register is not evenly fed.

This is not the North-Rhine-Westphalian dataset the rest of the German feed is

The German accommodation feed as a whole is heavily NRW-weighted: postcode areas 4 and 5 hold well over half of all addressed German rows. The pitches are the exception. They lean north — postcode areas 2 and 3, which is Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen and northern Hesse — and postcode area 1, Berlin and Brandenburg, holds not a single one.

And they are scattered rather than clustered. The 781 pitches sit in 459 different towns, and 295 of those towns hold exactly one. The largest single concentration anywhere in the set is eight — in Attendorn, Hattingen and Leer. That is the opposite shape to the hotel data, where a handful of resort towns carry thousands of rows, and it is why a pitch article cannot be a town ranking. There is nothing to rank.

Power, water and waste: the fields exist, and they are nearly always empty

A motorhome traveller wants to know four things before pulling in: can I fill up, can I empty, is there electricity, is there a shower. The register does carry tokens for all four. The published topic brief for this dataset said it did not, and that was wrong — but it was wrong in a way that barely helps you, because the tokens sit on a small minority of rows.

Read those columns the right way round. 135 pitches say they have a disposal point. That is not the same as 646 pitches having none — 222 rows carry no amenity data whatsoever, and among the 559 that do, the boards fill the field inconsistently. The number is a floor. It is useful for finding a pitch with a service point and useless for ruling one out.

The 559 photographs are not 559 photographs

This is the correction we would most want a reader to carry away. Counting the rows that carry an image address gives 559. Counting distinct image URLs gives 502 — so 73 rows are showing a picture that also belongs to another property. And 46 rows carry an image whose own file name announces that it is not a photograph of the place at all.

Deduplicated and destocked, 484 of the 781 pitches carry a photograph that is plausibly of that pitch — 62%, not 72%. We have not opened all 484, so treat even that as an upper bound. It does not change the finding that this is the best-illustrated class in the German data; it changes what you should expect when you click one.

Dogs: the most permissive class in the German register, by a distance

German amenity vocabulary is a minefield here, because the phrase that means “pets not permitted” contains the word that means “pets” — a substring filter counts 13,244 refusals as permissions. Matching on the audited token set instead, and counting only the properties that answer the question at all, the pitches are extraordinary: five of them say no.

But the denominator is 193, not 781. Only a quarter of the pitches answer the pets question, and the ones that bother to answer are self-selecting towards yes. The published Sauerland dog article found zero of twenty-one Sauerland pitches flagged as dog-friendly and called it a data artefact; nationally that reading holds up.

How to actually use this

1. Telephone. 715 of the 781 have a number and none of them have a booking link. The whole catalogue contains thirteen booking links and not one is attached to a pitch. This is a directory to ring, not a shelf to book from.
2. Do not trust an empty field. Absent power, absent disposal and absent opening dates all look identical here, and they mean “not published”, not “not there”. Ask the four questions on the phone.
3. Search by region, not by town. With 295 towns holding a single pitch, the useful unit is the postcode area or the tourist board, not the place name.
4. Expect a stock photo roughly one time in eight, and expect it most in the Bergisches Land and the Ruhr, where two files cover thirty-five properties between them.

What we don't know

• No opening season, no price, no pitch count, no maximum stay, no height barrier. These are the five things a motorhome traveller decides on and the register holds none of them.
• The class boundary with campsites is soft. 227 of these 781 rows are also filed as a campsite, so a quarter of them may be a pitch inside a campsite rather than a standalone aire. We have written that up separately in Germany's campsites.
• Amenity flags are self-declared to a regional board and are not audited. Nothing here has been verified by anyone, including us.
• The feed is not a market. Postcode area 1 holding zero pitches is a statement about Berlin and Brandenburg's tourism boards, not about whether you can park a motorhome there.
• We hold no ADAC, DTV or Bord Atlas grading for any pitch, and no service-point type. Where a pitch has an official grade, it is not in this data.
• Duplicates exist. Some pitches are filed twice, from two different regional feeds, with two different photographs and two different phone formats.

Sources

Deutsche Zentrale für Tourismus open-data knowledge graph (destination.one), sourced from the regional tourism boards and licensed CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA / public domain depending on the record. Retrieved 17 August 2026: 44,413 active German records held, 781 in the pitch union above. Hero photograph: Wohnmobilstellplatz »Reisemobile Otterndorf«, Otterndorf, supplied by Cuxland-Tourismus through destination.one under CC BY 4.0.

More from the same catalogue

• Germany's campsites: 941 rows, 846 places — the neighbouring class, and why the two overlap by 227 rows.
• Dog-friendly stays in the Sauerland — the same pet vocabulary, applied to fourteen towns.
• Germany's North Sea islands — what a tourist board that actually photographs its register looks like.
• Every property we hold in Attendorn — one of the three towns with eight pitches.