Finding a suitable place to stay

[nanall]

We're just back from a couple of weeks camping in the south of france. The campsite sounded just what we were after. Quiet, and a 15 minute walk from the beach. What we didnt realise was that the walk to the beach would be on busy roads with no pavements, and the beach itself would not be great - stony with lots of people fishing. Better beaches were a few miles away by car/train.

It got us thinking, that maybe there is a niche for a more specialised family friendly holiday search engine, that allowed you to customise searches. In our example, we would have liked to search for somewhere quiet, with facilities suitable for a 2 year old, within walking distance of beach and nearest village, both of which could have been walked to safely.

I wondered what your thoughts are? How do you find good places to stay? If such a search engine existed (or already exists) would you use it? Would you be prepared to spend a bit more time refining a search to get the best results?

Tripadvisor/Campsite review sites and GoogleMaps are usually good for providing this sort of info. I dont think a search engine will cut it as the campsites will play down the busy road, and big up the 15 mins to the beach bit.

No matter what website you use the content is in the control of the owner of the property. You wouldnt tell people the negative in any marketing - that would be bonkers. there are a couple of websites where the cottages are independently visited and written up but as an owner would you pay to go on this website if it made note of any of your "negative" points. there are loads of baby type websites out there already - babyfriendlyboltholes, awaywiththekids etc. they already allow you to do the refining bit. the issue is really that if you are picking somewhere and one particular aspect is really important to you then you have to ask that question before booking. we like it to be quiet so we ask specifically about this. we use trip advisor and googlemaps which are fantastic.

Thanks for the responses. Tripadvisor is where we tend to start from too, and we picked the campsite as it came highly recommended. I guess different people consider different things to be important in a holiday and their feedback on sites like tripadvisor reflects this, so perhaps the lesson in this for us is to to take it as a guide but do more research on the sites that look the best.