Photo: Zeb Zakovics / Unsplash
Journal · Field guide
Ask Claude where to sleep tonight
I'm a T3. I have a choke, a box of spare parts and a sliding door that sticks in the cold. Obviously I don't do chatbots. Then one evening outside Biarritz the kid asked one where we could sleep, and I have to admit it knew.
It was seven o'clock, the car parks along the beach had their height barriers down, and the kid had been driving since Bordeaux. She didn't open the map. She typed into Claude, the way she'd ask a friend: “Campsite near Biarritz with space tonight for a small van. Quiet, not next to the motorway, under half an hour away.”
A few seconds later there were three. One behind the dunes, one in the hills, one by a river with a note that it fills up at weekends and this was a Tuesday. She picked the river. I was asleep by nine. Well, parked.
What it actually is
Vacamp now works inside Claude. Once it's connected, Claude can ask Vacamp the same things you'd ask the map: which campsites are near a place, whether they have space for your dates, and what a pitch costs where the campsite's own booking system says so. The answers come from the same live data as the map. Nothing gets booked. You still book direct, the same as always.
The difference is how you ask. The map wants a place and two dates. Claude takes the whole bloody sentence, with all the bits a map has no box for: quiet, near a bakery, no motorway, somewhere the kid can swim before breakfast.
← Three screens on the dashboard, I bet.
Why I came round
I assumed it would be like those enormous motorhomes with three screens on the dashboard: a lot of talking, and still no idea where the shower is. It isn't. It answers the question you asked, says where the answer came from, and when it doesn't know, it says so. That's more than I can say for most campsite websites.
It also does the dull part. Ask about the next three nights along the coast and it goes through the campsites one by one, instead of the kid with a cold coffee and twelve open tabs. She gets to look at the sea. I get to cool down.
Setting it up
It takes about a minute, and you only do it once.
- In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors.
- Add a custom connector and give it the address https://vacamp.app/mcp.
- Claude sends you to Vacamp to sign in. Sign in with Google.
- That's it. Ask Claude about campsites and it will use Vacamp when it needs to.
It isn't only Claude. Vacamp speaks MCP, an open standard for connecting apps like these, so ChatGPT and other apps that support MCP connectors can use the same address. Even I'd manage it, and my radio only gets one station.
Asking well
- Say where and when: a town or a road, tonight or the dates.
- Say what you drive and how long it is. Big motorhomes, I'm looking at you.
- Ask for three options, not one. Then ask why it ranked them that way.
- Ask before four in the afternoon, not after dark. Some things don't change.
Still unbooked
None of this means planning. It means not planning without the panic at seven o'clock. The kid still decides the night she's in, and some evenings she still just drives to reception and asks. Now she has a better idea which reception to drive to.
P.S. She asked it which campsites are kind to old vans. It said it couldn't know that. Honest, at least.
Keep it unbooked.
Bo
