More than six million people a year visit Caravan Sitefinder. It's a comprehensive website for all things camping and motorcaravanning, and one of the services it offers is a pitch booking facility.
You can easily search for sites by location and the facilities on offer, and booking yourself a pitch is a straightforward procedure. Clicking on 'Check Availability' at the left-hand side of the screen brings up a drop-down list from which you can select your chosen dates. Parks with available pitches are presented to you, which you can then proceed to book online.
This website doesn't offer online booking to as many campsites as some others here, but it is extremely easy to use, and this counts for a lot, especially if you are relatively new to using the internet.

The Caravan Club keeps it simple and straightforward but you must be a member to use their online booking facility. Select the site you want to stay at, enter your dates and, if they're available, it gives you an option for which type of pitch you'd like, and asks for details of your 'van. If there is no availability, a calendar of alternative dates appears. You don't pay until you're on site. A handy feature of this website is the 'late availability' option which will show you campsites where pitches are available for the subsequent three weekends.

You feel that this website could work better than it does. If you're using it to search for appropriate campsites in mainland Europe it's a veritable gold mine, throwing up 61 options in one corner of Brittany alone. When it comes to booking a campsite – which is accessed via a different area of the home page menu – it produces a list of parks, sorted by country and region. You can then specify whether you want electricity, or to take pets, and how many people there will be in your party, but there's nothing to indicate whether it's going to be suitable for a 7m-long motorhome and whether or not it is a serviced pitch. Perhaps if you had been to the campsite before, you would know these answers, in which case this website could make life much easier than laboured phone conversations in 'Franglais'.

This is not technically a booking site, but 'availablepitch.com' earns its place in our Top Ten by offering the very useful service of finding campsites in Britain that have availability for the dates you want, saving you time on phone calls. You can narrow your search as much or as little as you like, either by location, facilities, or both. The day before the Easter break, it found me 13 parks in Devon with availability for a 'van. Then it was over to me to ring up and book one. The website's not going to win any awards for looks, but it has almost 400 parks to choose from and provides an excellent service.

It's extremely easy to find your way around the Camping and Caravanning Club's web booking facilities. There's a large green button on the home page and then all you need to know are your membership details, your vehicle's size and where you want to go. Once you've entered this, you'll be shown a new screen with a list of what type of pitches are available, and on what dates. If, as I found, there were no pitches with electric hook-ups left for the date you wanted, you can click on a link for nearby parks and move your request to a new campsite without having to re-type your details. You have to pay a deposit at the point of booking, then the balance when you arrive at the park. The website covers the Camping and Caravanning Club's campsites only (about 100 in all) and does not include bookings for its Certificated Sites.

Once you've made sure you're on the 'touring' website, rather than the main Park Resort web pages, this is a very clear, simple site to use. It has a map which shows details of 19 parks and a special click-through facility to help you book. Then, six easy steps take your details and requirements and, eventually, your payment. The booking form seems to steer you towards paying an extra £15 for 'cancellation cover' without explaining what this is (you only forfeit the deposit in the event of a cancellation, rather than the whole booking fee). One slight hitch on this otherwise well-executed website, is that it is only compatible with Internet Explorer so if you're on another web browser, beware.