New app to help grey nomads

Thousands of campers are estimated to still be stranded on Australia’s roads, but a new website is aiming to help them find somewhere to stay.

A new website is aiming to make it easy for grey nomads to find a safe place to stay during the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of campers still stranded on the roads.

Australian-born camping platform Aircamp, which has twice been featured as an Apple 'app of the day', lists over 8,000 campsites on its website and has almost 150,000 users.

The company, which normally facilitates camping site bookings for travellers, has been forced to shift its focus during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead become a vital resource for travellers to determine where they can stay.

It's estimated that tens of thousands of Australians – and visitors from overseas – are still stuck on the roads, unable to leave due to new state and territory border restrictions.

Aircamp's free status page, available here, has had almost 10,000 visits since it was established in the past two weeks.

"As a traveller myself, I have seen first hand how hostile some people have been while we were trying to find a permanent place to stay," Aircamp co-founder Mike Hill told The Australian.

"Our house is rented out, so returning home was not an option. If we can help one family find a safe place to stay then all of this work has been worth it."

The Caravan Industry Association of Australia estimates there could be as many as 75,000 people in caravan parks across the country.

Aircamp co-founder Marton Bodonyi told The Australian that his company sent out an email to all the campsite managers on its platform, with links to help them update their status.

"There are a growing number of lists out there on Facebook groups but they're hard to read, hard to manage and unverified," he said.

"The list has responses from the official campsite managers. We also allow any visitor to post their own status update for a campsite which is moderated by us and submitted as a community option.”

He added that his company does not condone unnecessary travel.

"We'd already built a heap of tools for reaching out to campsite owners and allowing them to manage their listings on the site, it made sense to build one for COVID-19,” he said.