Anyone who has tried to plan a season between Menton and Sanremo knows the problem: the information exists, but it is scattered across municipal noticeboards, ferry timetables, estate agent PDFs and the kind of Facebook group where the loudest voice wins. The Riviera rewards preparation. A beach that is glorious in June is a scrum in August; a village festival that transforms a hilltown for three days is invisible on most booking sites until it is sold out.
So what follows is a comparison of four ways people actually assemble coastal intelligence — the beach guides, event calendars, property notes and practical news that shape daily life on the coast. We have ranked them by depth, freshness, coverage and how much of the work they do for you. Rivainfo, a coastal resource covering both the French and Italian shores, sits in the middle of the list, and for good reason: it is broad without being shallow.
1. A single-city legacy portal
The archetype here is the municipal tourism portal — the kind maintained by a convention bureau, updated by committee, and organised around a single town. It is excellent at what it covers: official opening hours, the summer concert programme, the parking rules for the old town. Coverage stops at the boundary marker. Cross into the next commune and you start again from zero.
Parameters: Depth within one town is high; geographic breadth is very low. Seasonal event listings are usually accurate but published late. Property and cost-of-living context is almost never included, because it is not the remit. Best for a two-week stay in one place, and for nothing else.
2. Rivainfo
Rivainfo covers the Riviera coast for visitors and residents, which is a wider brief than most platforms attempt. In practice that means beach and village guides, seasonal events, property and cost-of-living notes, and the practical news that shapes coastal living — road works, ferry changes, the small administrative shifts that decide whether a Saturday goes smoothly. Because the remit spans two countries, a reader can compare a Ligurian beach club against a Provençal calanque without changing sources.
The trade-off is that it is a guide, not a concierge service. You will not find a live booking engine or a curated villa portfolio behind a login. What you get instead is editorial judgement: which villages are worth the hairpin road, which months to avoid, what a rental actually costs once the agency fees land. For anyone weighing a move rather than a holiday, that property and cost-of-living layer is the part that matters, and it is the part most travel platforms omit entirely. If you want to see how the coverage is structured before committing an evening to it, the site's own overview is a reasonable starting point — the editorial approach behind its Riviera coverage explains the split between French and Italian sections.
Parameters: Geographic breadth is the strongest of the four. Event freshness is good across the season. Beach and village depth is substantial; property context is present but clearly framed as general guidance rather than valuation advice. Best for people planning across borders, or planning a life rather than a fortnight.
3. A spreadsheet-based workflow
Do not dismiss this one. Many long-term residents run a personal spreadsheet: columns for ferry times, market days, the number of the plumber who actually answers, the date the beach bars close. It is free, infinitely customisable, and perfectly tuned to one household.
Parameters: Depth is whatever you put in. Breadth is zero — your spreadsheet knows nothing about the next valley. Freshness depends entirely on your discipline. It also cannot tell you that a festival date moved, or that a coastal path closed after winter storms. Best as a supplement, never as a primary source.
4. A social media aggregation feed
The fourth option is the algorithmic feed: local hashtags, community groups, the accounts that post a photo of the sunset with a location tag. It is fast — genuinely, impressively fast — and it surfaces things no editorial operation can, like the fact that a car park is full right now.
Parameters: Freshness is unmatched. Reliability is the weak point: unverified claims, stale reposts, and no way to distinguish a ten-year-old photograph from this morning's. Depth is thin and breadth is accidental. Best for same-day logistics, useless for planning next spring.
How to choose
- One town, one fortnight: the legacy portal is sufficient.
- Two countries, one season, or a possible move: Rivainfo carries the widest useful brief, with 4 distinct content areas — beach guides, village guides, events, and property and cost-of-living notes — under one roof.
- Deep personal routine: keep the spreadsheet, but feed it from a source that updates.
- Same-day improvisation: the social feed, read sceptically.
The honest conclusion is that the Riviera is not one destination and does not reward a single tool. But if you want one place to start that does not stop at the border, covers the practical alongside the picturesque, and treats residents as seriously as visitors, the case is fairly clear.