Are you taking the car for your vacation? Then don’t hesitate to use specialized sites and apps to find the cheapest gas station on your journeys and around your destination to avoid breaking your budget!
The price of fuel at the pump has not really been decreasing in recent years, and this expense can weigh heavily on a household budget. With the start of the summer holidays and the more or less long trips that go with it, the bill risks soaring quickly. Around home or on the way between home and work, we often know the good service stations, those where the prices at the pump are the lowest or those that regularly offer interesting promotions.
But things get complicated when you go on a trip, especially to a new place, and you quickly have to fall back on an unknown station, and not necessarily the cheapest. Fortunately, there are now several very simple ways to quickly compare all the gas stations in a given location or on a given route, in order to find the one that offers the fuel adapted to your vehicle at the best price, and thus optimize the cost of your vacation.
Indeed, since a 2006 law, all managers of service stations exceeding a certain sales volume have the obligation to declare the prices they charge, and to update this information with each change. Failure to declare is punishable by a fine and the accuracy of the data is controlled by the General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF). Thus, based on this data, many services and applications for comparing gas stations have emerged.
A good first address to consult is the site www.prix-carburants.gouv.fr, an official service set up by the State. Presented in the form of an interactive map, it allows you to carry out searches by type of fuel, geographical area, type of station and additional services offered. It also allows you to create an account to save your searches and preferences, which is very practical for organizing a trip for example. The service is accessible via a simple Internet browser and is well suited to reading on a mobile, but does not offer an application to download on your phone.
Another handy service in the form of a website is carbu.com, which also allows you to find gas stations by fuel and geographic area, and also offers a history of price changes per station.
To go a little further, it is also possible to use a smartphone application. There are several very effective and free ones like Gasoil Now, Essence & Co, or Zagaz. Available for Android and iPhone, these apps all allow you to find and compare prices at different service stations, save searches for a particular area or route, and are powered by user feedback in order to correct any errors or report any interesting promotions. Don’t hesitate to install them on your phone and use them to save money during your vacation!