hoprat

Who we are

About hoprat

hoprat helps families and couples in the Benelux to find a break of a few days a few hours from home, and to prepare the stay before booking with the operator.

Who publishes this site

hoprat.com is published by Rachid Ahannach, trading as Holliday Pratique, in Jupille-sur-Meuse (Liège), Belgium. It is an independent project with no ownership ties to any holiday park operator. Full details of the publisher and the host are given in the legal notice.

The name: hoprat is a contraction of Holliday Pratique.

The logo: a fir tree and the road that leads to it. hoprat is not looking for the finest forest in Europe, but for the one you can reach by car from where you live.

Who writes here

Yourachme — the pen name of Rachid Ahannach, who publishes this site.

I am a developer. I started with a degree in electromechanics and industrial programming, then moved across to software development.

hoprat came out of a very concrete irritation: every time I looked for somewhere to go on holiday, it took me days. Comparing parks, working out drive times, checking what is actually on site — the time went into open tabs.

I have stayed in several of these parks — mostly Landal sites in the Netherlands, in Zeeland and in the north of the country, and two in Germany — and I look back on them fondly. That is what made me want to build the tool I would have liked to have: verifiable data rather than promises, and enough to decide in a few minutes.

Why this site exists

Looking for a holiday park in the Benelux means opening fifteen tabs: one website per operator, maps that say nothing about real driving times, reviews scattered everywhere, and no simple way of knowing whether the weekend will hold up if it rains. hoprat starts from the opposite end: you say where you are leaving from, who with, on what budget and how long you are willing to drive, and the site ranks the resorts according to those criteria, then prepares what comes next — a day plan, places nearby, the forecast weather, an estimated total budget.

hoprat sells nothing and takes no bookings. Booking always takes place on the operator's website.

How the Hoprat Score is calculated

The Hoprat Score is a rating out of 100, recalculated for your search: there is no universal ranking of parks. Ten dimensions are each rated out of 100 from the characteristics of the resort and of its surroundings:

  • Distance — driving time from the departure city you have chosen.
  • Price — our estimate of the accommodation budget, set against that of the other parks in the database.
  • Facilities — indoor pool, spa, children's club, bowling, bike hire, etc.
  • Surroundings — forest, sea, lake, mountains, countryside or a nearby city.
  • Family — nearby facilities and activities suitable for children.
  • Dining — the restaurants listed around the resort and their rating.
  • Things to do — number, variety and proximity of the activities nearby.
  • Rainy day — everything that is still possible indoors.
  • Fine weather — the outdoors, water and nature.
  • Reviews — the resort's average public rating and the volume of reviews.

These ten ratings are then weighted according to your travel profile. A family with young children raises the weight of “family” and of “rainy day”; a couple raises “dining” and “environment”; seniors raise “distance”. That is why two different people will see two different rankings of the same parks, and why every listing shows the detail of the calculation, dimension by dimension, with the sentence that explains the rating.

What does not go into the score: no payment, no affiliate commission, no commercial agreement. A park cannot pay to be ranked higher, nor to be added to the database.

Where the data comes from

  • Park listings (facilities, moods, accommodation, activities and nearby restaurants): compiled by hand from the operators' public websites and from regional tourist information, then proofread.
  • Driving time: calculated with OSRM on OpenStreetMap road data.
  • Maps: OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL licence), displayed with Leaflet.
  • Weather: Open-Meteo, queried by your browser at the moment you open a listing.
  • Photos: the real photos of the places come from Wikimedia Commons, under free licences, with the author and the licence credited beneath each image; the cover visuals and the thumbnails are mood illustrations from Unsplash.

Why some data is indicative

We prefer to say so plainly rather than let you believe in a precision we do not have:

  • The amounts are not operator prices. Unless it is explicitly stated “price recorded on … on the park's website”, the figure shown is an hoprat estimate: our own order of magnitude for the accommodation budget for 3 nights for 4 people, calculated in order to rank and compare parks against one another (score, sorting, budget filter, €/€€/€€€ levels, total budget). You will not find it as such on the operator's own website: the actual price depends on your dates, on the type of cottage, on the number of people and on the promotions of the moment, and is to be checked there. When a price is recorded on the operator's website, it is shown in place of the estimate, with its date. The total budget itself remains an estimate (accommodation, travel, groceries, outings), not a quotation.
  • The driving times are calculated excluding traffic, from city centre to resort. On a Friday evening at the start of the holidays, allow appreciably longer.
  • The ratings and the number of reviews are public averages recorded at a given moment, not reviews collected by hoprat.
  • The opening hours, restaurants and nearby activities change, close down or move: check before setting off.
  • The photos are not the parks' official photos. Official images belong to the operators and will only be used with their permission. A mood photo illustrates the type of stay, not the accommodation you will book.

In every case, the information that prevails is the one shown on the operator's website at the time of booking. If you spot an error, write to us: we correct it.

How the site is funded

hoprat is free and requires no account. Two sources are planned to fund it — to date, neither brings in anything yet:

  • Affiliate links. None of our outbound links earns a commission today: our Awin and TradeTracker applications are under review. The day one is accepted, the buttons will become affiliate links and hoprat will earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. They are already flagged as such on the site and influence neither the Hoprat score nor the order of results.
  • Advertising. The site displays Google AdSense ads, always identified by the label “Advertisement” and kept separate from the content. They are never mixed in with the search results.

The details of the data processed and of the cookies are set out in the privacy policy.

Write to us

An error in a listing, a park to add, a question about the score, a GDPR request, a partnership proposal: go through the Contact page or write directly to contact@hoprat.com. We reply within 10 working days.