Tell HouseTrip about your best holiday home experiences and you could be in with the chance of winning a £200 Boots voucher NOW CLOSED

[AngelieMumsnet]

HouseTrip have asked us to find out about Mumsnetters' best holiday home experiences, either from childhood or more recently.

Here's what HouseTrip have to say:

"We're on a mission to make it easy for people to holiday wherever they want in the world but in beautiful whole homes rather than cramped hotels. Holidaying in a home allows families to spend crucial quality time together that they don’t always get in normal life in order to make memories that will last a lifetime”

So, what has been your best holiday home experience? Maybe it was staying in a cottage as a child? Perhaps you have fond memories of visiting a city apartment? Or maybe your best experiences have been in a villa you go to each year with your kids? What made your experience so special?

Whatever your best holiday home experience has been, HouseTrip would love to hear about it.

Everyone who posts on this thread will be entered into a prize draw where one winner will receive a £200 Boots voucher.

Please note your comments may be included on HouseTrip's social media channels, and possibly elsewhere, so please only post if you're comfortable with this.

Thanks and good luck,
MNHQ

Do you know, we are on hols right now. Sat in a caravan with the doors open. Wine in hand and watching the sea. A lovely park in the Isle of Wight and this is now our second year. Totally beautiful and some lovely memories to keep.

Best experience: Cretan villa. Comfortably furnished, great well equipped kitchen (we enjoyed cooking using local produce) and CD player etc for music. Too cold to use pool but in beautiful garden with breathtaking mountain views. In pretty, sleepy village: a chance to see a little of local Greek life.

For us it's something we can pick up and move at a moments notice. Currently a VW campervan.

Gites are the way to go providing you've all got passports and can 'roll' with it to go to France! The pace of life is chilled, the food good and the wine very quaffable. What more could one ask? Oh, the opportunity to practise one's French! :-). Du pain, du vin et du Boursin!

We stayed in a lovely cottage in West Wales, lots of games for the kids and a well stocked bookshelf as well as a selection of DVDs really helped when the weather got a bit much.

We have had some lovely holidays in cottages in the Uk and Gites in France. Last year the children loved staying in a Gite in Brittany, we had a swimming pool in the grounds and a lovely garden for them to play. The only bad points were the hundreds of flies which got everywhere (it made it too hard to cook at the gite as they got everywhere so we ate out a lot) and on the last day one of my DD's knocked the shower door getting out, it fell off and shattered the sink. Trying to explain to the owner what had happened wasn't easy.

A high point is if the kitchen if fully equipt and has everything that we would need. And has fans or air-conditioning if it is hot.

My best holiday ever was to a farm in Devon when my sister and I were little. We watched cows being milked, saw eggs being collected and played in the farmyard and huge playroom. I'd love to go back but it's probably completely different now.

My favourite holidays have been staying at a relaxing wee cottage on the Isle of Skye. No internet, phone, tv. House was clean but not so immaculate that we were afraid to move. A whole week of relaxing, reading, kids running around outside and no work. It was so good that we are going back in a weeks time. Can't wait.

As a family we always rent cottages for our holidays, works far better with small dc than a Hotel.

However my favourite break was a Hen weekend I went on last year. We hired a huuuuge 16th Century mansion in the peak district complete with swimming pool. Just being able to stay there was an amazing experience.

We stayed in a lovely holiday home in Ireland last year, it was just so nice to have a clean, safe place with lots of instructions left for everything! It could have done with a bigger garden but apart from that it was lovely.

My brother in law arranged for our whole family to holiday together in Spain. He arranged everything, from getting us all available at the same time, to flights, to the static holiday homes. He even arranged some of our excursions, so we'd all spend time together.
He made sure we were all happy and looked after.
It was a memorable experience that I will always treasure .. mostly because of the kindness that went into the planning of it.

A house by a loch in the west highlands, with a herd of wild goats that frequently stopped the traffic and invaded the garden! So beautiful and peaceful, but still with a pub in walking distance....

Probably a caravan we stayed in in Hastings. It was really homely with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a reasonable sized living/kitchen area and was a great base for us to go back to

Went on a canoeing holiday. It was amazing and I felt really good afterwards about all the exercise I did. Even if I did gorge on holiday food!

Best holidays as a child were camping in Devon :)

Nowadays we tend to stay in cottages in either the Lake District, Wales or Devon/Cornwall.

What makes a cottage great for us is a large enclosed garden for our dog and our toddler, a dishwasher, pubs and beach within walking distance and for it to be as nice as our house at least. One of my favourites was on the Llyn Peninsula, just 100 yards from the beach :)

Last year we stayed in a cottage on the Isle of Wight - it was amazing, a lovely place with fields behind us and farmland all around. Down a lane there was a fantastic beach and the whole island is crammed with things to do. We visited a lot of places but what I enjoyed the most was watching my 2 and 4 year olds run wild in the garden, stroke the horse, climb trees and have so much fun with no telly!

Well you can't beat this: we rented a cottage over Easter, and on the Sunday morning a rabbit was mooching about in the garden outside the kitchen door! :) I took a photo and when I showed the children they said 'wow! The Easter bunny is real!'. The egg hunt in the garden was quite magical after that!

We usually go for something basic as we don't need/want anything fussy when we're on holiday. Small cottage, self cater. Nice.

We stayed in a rented cottage in North Devon last year during the first week of September. It was high on the hill in Northam and had an amazing sea view from the first floor lounge. We were right on the doorstep of the beach. It was the week that kids went back to school and was the last week of wall to wall sunshine. Our 2 year old had the most enormous beach in the world virtually to himself - it was bliss. It was the same area that my family used to holiday when I was a child so there was a real sense of nostalgia about the whole thing

With children, I find it so much more relaxed in a holiday home. You have no strict meal times set upon you so you don't have to get up early for breakfast if you fancy a lie in. There is the cooking element but I always prefer cooking when I'm on holiday because a) it's fun going to foreign supermarkets and trying new food! and b) it's more relaxed when you're away so it's more of a leisure activity.
You get more space too!

As a young teenager, I was sent every summer for 3 weeks on a homestay in the Gaelteacht, the Irish-language speaking area in the west of Ireland. It was another world, rural and traditional and I loved it, remember it fondly.

I am looking forward to staying in a cottage in Weymouth in a couple of weeks time. I usually stay in a caravan on a holiday park, so it will be nice to actually stay in a house, with proper furniture, beds etc and within walking distance of the beach.

Prior to this, my best holiday was in a lodge on a caravan park. The bedding and equipment were all so much nicer than in a caravan.

As a child, I remember staying in a house in Bournemouth, that belonged to a friend of my parents and that was brilliant. He went home every summer (teacher) and let friends and family use his house as his own.

I do like the charm of a holiday home, but we also like the benefits of a hotel, such as a pool. So a holiday home, with a pool on site, would be key.