Salon Atlantica - Venice Verte Campsite awarded European Eco-label

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Camping Venice Vert this week became the first campsite in the Poitou-Charentes region to achieve the European Eco-label, part of a scheme introduced following the Rio summit in 1992.  The award was made yesterday at the Salon Atlantica event for industry professionals.

The 2.2 hectare site originally created in 1953, offers 140 pitches for tents, caravans and motorhomes as well as 15 chalets and 15 mobile-homes.  It has been a four star site since 18 Sept 2008, and the owner Béatrice Robin invested around 110,000€ in obtaining the eco-label status.

The campsite is the first in the Poitou-Charentes region to achieve that standard, although the hotel Les Orangeries in Vienne also achieved the label under the ‘tourist accommodation' category.  The campsite had to satisfy 36 criteria to achieve the award, and amongst the initiatives put in place were a sorting area for waste, installation of solar panels for heating water, installing low-energy bulbs in all of the cottages and removing complementary sachets of sugar, jam and butter.

Salon Atlantica is an event exclusively reserved for industry professionals, and is held annually across four separate halls at the site in La Rochelle.  Some 260 exhibitors will be present together with an estimated 3,000 visitors, including professionals from the UK, Holland and Spain.

Despite early indications of a relatively poor year for visitor numbers across Poitou-Charentes, visitor numbers for camping are estimated to be up by around 1.5% in Charente Maritime, and this event gives the industry a starting point to consider how they are going to improve on this in 2009.