“Aurore, it’s always More. It has to make people go Wow.”
– Jean-François
The constant challenge
As early as January, Aurore and I sit down together to think about the season ahead. We look for a common thread, a theme, a direction. These days, the hardest part isn’t creating – it’s innovating. It’s about making something new out of formats everyone already knows. And for that, there’s no such thing as too many of us!
Everyone gets involved and stays on the lookout for something new, an idea… The moment a team member spots something interesting on the internet, at an event or on a trip, they send it my way. I then take care of contacting suppliers, comparing, negotiating, and working out how to adapt the idea to our own stage.
Everyone brings something to the table. Valentin works on the staging, while I’m more on the organisation and behind the scenes. Véro sometimes brings back costumes from Asia depending on the themes we’ve chosen. One year, it was Aurore herself combing through the Goutte d’Or district in Paris to find costumes on the theme of the “1001 Nights.”
Before she even took over the running of the campsite, Aurore had herself been entertainment manager for several seasons. She knows this work from the inside. The whimsical ideas are often hers. The execution, the stagecraft, that’s my role. But neither of us does anything without the other.
Surprise, surprise
For 2026, we’ve chosen a nod to the star of Sothis, which rises at the same time as the sun for the Egyptians – precisely on 14 July, the day the campsite opened in 1976. A subtle thread that few guests will notice, but one that shapes the entire summer programme.
We’ve been working for over a year on the soirée blanche for our 50th anniversary. Aurore wanted to bring together on one stage the finest tableaux from previous editions. This year, we’re compiling the very best of what we’ve done. It’s the first soirée blanche that tells the story of all the others.
Different themes will come together in harmony. The horses from the show “Fiers à cheval,” which audiences loved, will be there – as poetic and romantic as ever. And of course there will be a surprise that even Aurore doesn’t know about yet. Some things remain the secret of the conductor.
The Wow effect
The idea for the soirées blanches was born from one of the famous Saint-Tropez parties Aurore had been invited to. At the time she thought to herself: why not us? And so, for the campsite’s 40th anniversary, we staged our first big soirée blanche, with spectacular staging on a scale no one in the camping world was offering yet. Since then, the idea has been copied by other establishments. Never as well, of course.
The bigger the challenge, the more energy we find to rise to it. It’s a matter of image, of reputation, of collective pride. We’re always chasing that Wow effect, as Aurore so nicely puts it!
Between us: Aurore’s words
There has always been entertainment at Esterel Caravaning. In the early days, with my parents, we didn’t have much. Pétanque tournaments, volleyball. My mother would hand out the bottles of wine to the winners herself. And then there were the famous deckchair tournaments: whoever stayed lying down the longest won. It was modest, but it was already entertainment.
In 1996, we celebrated the campsite’s 20th anniversary. I had just taken over, and I wasn’t quite sure what we were going to do. Around a table with Jean-François, we asked ourselves: what happens over the course of a year? All the celebrations: Easter, the Fête de la Musique, Halloween, Christmas. We decided to put together a condensed version of all these festivities, every couple of weeks. We’d turned a golf cart into a giant Father Christmas sleigh. We handed out presents along the campsite’s paths. It was cobbled together, done with whatever we had on hand, but we were inventing our own entertainment.
Jeff and I have never stopped since. Whenever I have a completely crazy idea, he always finds a way to make it happen. For Esterel Caravaning’s 40th anniversary, we even had a moon suspended twelve metres up, at the end of a crane, with circus artists swinging from it. This year will be just as incredible!
– Aurore
