You spot the prices, we ask the questions

Eamon Byrne, from Dublin, has been in touch after discovering a fairly enormous difference between the price of a French camping holiday with a well-known international operator if you are Irish and if you are British. Keen to visit the Côte d'Azur for a fortnight in June, Byrne visited the Keycamp Holidays website where, after selecting the Irish flag on the homepage, he was quoted a price of €1,554 for two weeks at a campsite in La Baume. He planned to make his own travel arrangements from Ireland and had opted to stay in a fairly sizeable- looking Supernova tent.

Curious, he went back to the keycamp.com homepage and selected the British flag, after which he entered exactly the same details as before. This time he was quoted a price of £768, which is approximately €1,116 or more than €400 less than the cost of the holiday via the Irish flag on the site.

Earlier this week, PriceWatch visited the same site and entered the same details as Byrne and found that the gap had grown. When we went to the Irish section of the site in search of a two-week holiday in the La Baume campsite we were quoted €1,627, while the same holiday when accessed from the British section of the Keycamp site cost just £748 or €1,087.

We got in touch with Keycamp Holidays in Cork, where a commendably upfront spokeswoman described our reader's query as "100 per cent right". She said that the main reason the prices were so different this year was because the UK prices have been discounted in June to counter a potential lack of demand from families there because of the England soccer team's involvement in the World Cup finals.

Sadly, the Irish soccer team is not involved so a similar discount was not put in place here. The good news for our reader and others keen on a camping trip with Keycamp in June, however, is that the company has "recognised this as a situation" and has decided to lower its June prices for Irish holidaymakers to match more closely those being offered in the UK.

The spokeswoman said that a new Irish Keycamp brochure was due out in the second week in March and the discounted price structure would be reflected in that. In the meantime, she said, if customers contact them about holidays and "we see that there is a price difference then we will match the UK price".

What's more . . .

A reader has e-mailed PriceWatch to complain about the "crazy" price she was forced to pay for a cup of hot chocolate recently. Cafe en Seine, on Dublin's Dawson Street, charges €3.50 a cup. "I did get some marshmallows with it, but this was little consolation," she writes.