French tolls

[rainydogday]

Has anyone done this? We are driving about 8-10 hours down and usually end up scrabbling about for euros for the toll or worrying about the machine refusing the credit card. Does anyone have a fail-proof way? DH gets panicky about having to reverse out of toll both 😆 Do you end up paying more for pre paid tag thing or shall I just wing it with credit card? I have a Halifax clarity card which I don't think i get charged for using when purchasing abroad. Do the toll Boths take these?

We travelled to La Rochelle (via Paris) last year and managed to pay at most (if not all?) of the tolls with a credit card. I think we kept a few euros in cash for the shorter-distance tolls but I'm pretty sure you will be fine with your credit card.

I had a quick look online before we went to check how much we would end up paying in total to use the tolls.

Never had problems with the tolls and driven in France loads. I find most of them take cards and give change.

We've used various of the toll motorways on holidays over the last few years. Never any issues with our credit cards. I found the roads we used were quiet enough at the toll so there wasnt a queue behind us if we were having issues!

We have a t-tag which you buy and attach to the windscreen. Brilliant. No hassle, just automatic. No scrabbling for cards or euro's.

We’ve got an ATMB toll pass which sits behind our rear view mirror and lets us through. It’s linked to our credit card. Probably too late for this year but worth thinking about. Lots more info on the ukcampsite site

Get a SANEF tag! You just stick it to your windscreen. It means that you can go through the t lanes so you don't have to queue. You just drive through that lane and it beeps and the barrier opens. You don't even have to stop! It's linked to your bank account and it direct debits the amount. We used it last year to drive down to the south of France and it was brilliant.

Here's the link: www.saneftolling.co.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7v-Zo5qr3AIVRLTtCh233gk-EAAYASAAEgI32fD_BwE

We have the sanef toll tag too and just drive through and billed at the end of the month. Simple 😀

Ooo, this is interesting, we’re going to DLP in a few weeks. But we’re staying in Reims and Versailles either end of Disneyland trip.

We have a tag.
It ends up costing a bit more BUT no more having to wake up your passenger to pay for tolls!

Wish we'd got a tag, we'll definitely get one for next year. Doing tolls towing a caravan was hard work. One toll wouldn't take our ticket so I had to press the help button - despite my best attempts I had no idea what the man was saying, but he fixed the machine so we could pay our toll and go.

If you're a member of the caravan club the sanef tag is free I think.

Yes, we've had one for a few years - we found that fewer of the tolls are manned than used to be the case, so we were paying with a card anyway, rather than cash. There is a link to the Sanef website if you're using the Eurotunnel, which waives the 10 Eu initial admin fee. Here

As I recall, you pay a yearly admin fee, plus something like 5 Eu for each month of the year that you use the tag (but capped at 10 Eu/year), so it is slightly more expensive, but means you can cruise through the faster tolls. We've found it's saved us a lot of time, noticeably when driving to the Alps in the winter, so definitely worth it.

One other thing to mention is that even if something does go wrong at the unmanned booths, you can press a button to speak to someone. Even though they didn’t speak English so we couldn’t explain, they just pressed a button to let us through. Was relieved we didn’t have to reverse out!

Mastercard or VISA should work. Maestro don't as far as I know.