For years the answer to "can I book a French berth in advance?" was a flat no. You called on the radio, you took your chances, and in August you anchored off if the port was full. That has genuinely changed in the last few seasons, and as a visiting sailor who hates uncertainty I am grateful for it. But the change is uneven, and knowing which ports take an online booking and which still want a phone call is the difference between a planned cruise and a daily gamble.
Let me walk through what actually works in 2026, app by app, and where the gaps still are.
Navily: the one most visitors end up using
Navily started as a crowdsourced cruising guide, the Med equivalent of looking over a friend's shoulder, and it grew a booking layer on top. Today it lets you reserve a berth in over a thousand partner marinas across France and the wider Mediterranean and Atlantic, directly from the app.
The flow is the one you would expect from a hotel app. You search the port, enter your dates and your boat dimensions, and Navily calculates the price and shows whether the marina has space. If it is a partner port, you pay and you get a confirmation. If it is not, you still get the port information, the reviews, the depths and the layout, but you have to contact the capitainerie yourself.
What I like is the reviews. Other sailors leave honest notes on holding, swell, noise and how the capitaine treats visitors, and that has saved me from a couple of rolly ports I would otherwise have booked blind. The depth and anchorage data is genuinely useful for the Med, where the difference between a calm night and a sleepless one is often a single headland.
Port Adhoc and the port-group platforms
Port Adhoc runs its own network of marinas, mostly Atlantic and Mediterranean, and several of them appear inside Navily as partners, so you can book a Port Adhoc berth without leaving the app. For longer stays or ashore storage you fill in an online quote form on their own site and a port team comes back with a tailored price.
The Port Adhoc figures are useful as a sanity check on annual costs, by the way. An 8-metre boat stored afloat at Port Médoc near Bordeaux runs around 2,163 euros a year, and afloat at Port Napoléon near Marseille about 3,150 euros. That is a different conversation from a visitor night, but if your "visit" is turning into a season it is worth knowing the long-stay numbers, which I dig into in the cost of a French marina night.
Some larger municipal ports run their own booking portals too, often branded with a digital marina name and reachable from the port's website. La Rochelle, the big Brittany ports and several Riviera marinas let you reserve or at least enquire online directly. The downside is that each one is a separate login and a separate interface, which is exactly why an aggregator like Navily wins for a visitor crossing several regions in one trip.
MyBoat and the rest
MyBoat and a few similar apps cover boat management, logbooks and sometimes berth services, and they overlap with Navily on the cruising-guide side. For pure berth booking as a foreign visitor, Navily has the widest French marina coverage I have found, and it is the one I open first. The others are worth having if you already use them for navigation or boat admin, but I would not switch platforms just to book a single night.
When you still have to pick up the radio
Here is the honest limit. Online booking covers maybe a third of French ports well, the bigger and more commercial ones, and thins out fast as you go smaller and prettier. The tiny Breton harbour, the Corsican fishing port, the quiet Languedoc municipal basin: many of these are still call-on-arrival, VHF channel 9, take what is free on the visitor pontoon.
So my working method is a hybrid:
- For a port I must reach on a fixed date (a crew change, a flight, a hard weather window), I book online a few days ahead through Navily if it is a partner.
- For everywhere else I rock up, call the capitainerie on VHF 9, and sort it on arrival.
- In peak August on the Riviera I do both, because a confirmed berth is worth its weight, and I have written separately about finding a French Riviera berth in August when even that is not enough.
The mechanics of arriving, calling the office and checking in are the same whether you booked ahead or not, and I have laid out that whole sequence in how French marinas work for visitors.
What to have ready before you book
Whatever app you use, the booking wants the same handful of facts, and having them to hand makes the whole thing thirty seconds rather than three minutes.
Your length overall and your beam, honestly stated, because French berths are sized and priced by length and a misdeclared boat causes friction on arrival. Your draught, which matters at the shallower Atlantic and Channel ports. Your dates. A card. And, increasingly, your boat's registration details, since some ports verify them at check-in.
One quiet warning about money: an online price is usually the berth alone. Fuel is a separate operation on its own quay with its own terminal, which I cover in where to bunker fuel in France, and on the Med electricity and water can be metered on top of the booked rate. Read the small print on the confirmation, not just the headline number.
My honest take after a few seasons
Online booking has made cruising France less stressful, full stop, and I will not pretend otherwise. Knowing I have a confirmed berth waiting at the end of a tide-gated passage has changed how I plan. But it has not replaced the radio, and I do not think it should. Half the charm of the French coast is the small port that does not appear in any app, where you call on 9, take a spot on the visitor pontoon, and go and say bonjour at the capitainerie. Book the dates you cannot afford to miss. Leave room for the ones you can.
