PitchDesk

Booking software for UK campsites. £7.99 a month, no commission.

Guests check availability and pay on your own website. The card payment goes into your own Stripe account, so the money never passes through us. One flat price for any number of pitches.

For campsites, caravan parks, CL and CS sites and glamping sites in the United Kingdom.

A 12 pitch site taking £40,000 a year
Pitchup at 15%£6,000
PitchDesk at £7.99 a month£95.88
Left in your bank£5,904.12

What commission costs a small site

A family books four nights on a hardstanding pitch and pays £180. A listing site at 15% keeps £27 of it. Do that 220 times across a season and you have paid out £6,000.

Some of those bookings are worth the commission. A camper who had never heard of your site, found you on a listing page and drove three hours to reach you is a booking you did not have before.

The rest are the problem. The guest who stayed last August, has your postcode in their phone and typed your name into Google still arrives through the listing site, and you still pay 15% for a booking that was already yours.

PitchDesk costs £95.88 a year at any volume. On £40,000 of bookings that is 0.24% of what you take.

The obvious answer is to knock a few pounds off for booking direct. On most of these channels you are not allowed to, which is the subject of the next section.

Put your own figures into the calculator.

Commission on £40,000 a year

Listing siteRateA year
Pitchup 15% £6,000
Airbnb 15.5% £6,200
Hipcamp 15% £6,000
Booking.com
estimated, not published
15% £6,000
Campsites.co.uk 12% £4,800
PitchDesk 0% £95.88
Each rate shown at what it costs a site that cannot reclaim VAT. Assumes every booking arrives through that listing site. Booking.com does not publish a rate.

You are probably not allowed to be cheaper on your own website

Rate parity is the clause most campsite owners have agreed to and never read. It does not only stop you charging listing-site guests more. It stops you offering anyone a better deal than the listing shows.

Pitchup's supplier terms require the same or better rates and the same or better payment, amendment and cancellation policies on "your websites, apps, phone", and say they run random price comparisons, with temporary suspension of the listing as the penalty. Hipcamp's landowner terms ask UK hosts to covenant that their price is the same as or lower than the price on their own website.

Booking.com dropped parity across the European Economic Area in 2024, but the United Kingdom left the EEA, and the terms served to a British registration still name it a narrow parity country. Campsites.co.uk has no clause, and its integration will not let you apply an uplift anyway.

Airbnb is the exception. The word does not appear in their UK terms.

So the lever is convenience. Same price, one click, on the page the camper is already looking at, and no commission taken out of it.

The clauses, channel by channel

And the thing nobody mentions

Pitchup does not sell a booking form you can put on your own website. The badges link to Pitchup's category pages, and their widget builder embeds a list of campsites near you, which on your own homepage means your competitors.

Their listing is a shop window on somebody else's high street. There is no till on your own counter unless you put one there.

Nothing here says leave

Keep the listings that bring you campers who have never heard of you. The argument is about the other half of your season.

Four steps to taking your own bookings

Most owners are live the same afternoon. You need a website you can paste one line into, or nothing at all if you use the page we host for you.

  1. Open an account

    Email address and a password. No card for 30 days.

  2. Add your pitches and your prices

    Pitch types, how many of each, nightly rates, seasons, minimum stays, arrival days, dogs, awnings, firewood. Everything a camper needs to see before they pay.

  3. Connect your Stripe account

    You either sign in to the Stripe account you already have or open one in about ten minutes. Payouts land in your bank on Stripe's normal schedule.

  4. Paste one line into your website

    Your booking form appears where you put it, in your own colours. There is a hosted page at pitchdesk.co.uk/book/your-site as well, for a site with no website at all.

<!-- put this where the booking form should appear -->
<div data-pitchdesk="pk_live_9f3c2a7b"></div>
<script src="https://pitchdesk.co.uk/w.js" async></script>

That is the whole installation. It works in WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and any hand-written HTML page.

See what the guest sees

Three differences that matter

Everything else on this page follows from these.

The money lands in your own Stripe account

Card payments are charged directly on your Stripe account. We take no application fee and hold no float. If PitchDesk disappeared tomorrow, every payment already taken would still be yours, sitting in an account with your name on it.


The contract is between you and the camper

Your cancellation policy, your arrival times and the rule about dogs on the top field. The camper ticks your terms at the point of paying and those terms are stored with the booking, so you can see the version they agreed to a year later.


One price, whatever the season does

£7.99 a month at 3 pitches and at 300. A wet July costs you the same as a full one. There is no per-booking fee, no percentage and no charge for extra pitch types.

Who it suits

Type of siteWhat usually hurtsRead more
CL and CS sites
Five vans, members only
Bookings still come by phone, in the evening, while you are cooking. There are over 2,100 Certificated Locations in the UK, each capped at five vans, and £7.99 a month is less than one night's pitch fee. CL and CS sites
Campsites and touring parks
10 to 200 pitches
Commission on repeat guests, and a spreadsheet that only one person understands. Campsites
Glamping
Pods, safari tents, shepherd's huts
High value bookings, so a percentage hurts more. Guests want to pick the hut with the hot tub. Glamping
Listing and directory sites
You send the traffic
You have the audience but no way to take a booking on the page. Listing sites

What it does, and what it does not

In the product today

  • Live availability by pitch type, by night, with your minimum stays and arrival days applied
  • Pooled pitches, or named pitches the guest picks from a list
  • Seasonal rates, weekend rates, bank holiday rates, per person or per pitch pricing
  • Deposits taken as a percentage, a fixed amount or the first night
  • The balance collected automatically from the same card on the day you choose
  • Card guarantee with nothing taken until arrival, if that is how you work
  • Extras such as electric hookup, firewood, dogs, extra vehicles and gazebos
  • Closures for the days a field is too wet or the family is using it
  • Your terms and cancellation policy shown and stored with every booking
  • Confirmation emails to the guest and to you, from your own site name
  • A guest page for every booking, so they can see what they booked
  • A hosted booking page, for a site with no website

Not in the product yet

These are the honest gaps. If one of them is how you run your park, PitchDesk is not the right software for you this year.

  • No channel manager. We do not push availability to Pitchup, Booking.com or Airbnb, so a site listed on those keeps updating them by hand.
  • No till, shop or bar takings.
  • No seasonal or annual pitch accounts and no owner statements.
  • No holiday home sales.
  • No electric meter readings or barrier control.
  • No housekeeping rotas.
  • No mobile app. It is a website that works on a phone.

A large touring park with a shop, a bar and 40 seasonal vans needs a park management system. We say so on the CampManager page.

The whole UK market, priced

Every booking route a UK campsite normally considers, costed against the same site: 12 pitches taking £40,000 a year.

Provider What they charge A year at 12 pitches
PitchDesk
Booking software
£7.99 a month, any number of pitches £95.88
Pitchup
Listing site
15% commission £6,000
Campsites.co.uk
Listing site
10% commission plus VAT £4,800
Hipcamp
Listing site
12.5% commission plus VAT, and Stripe on top £6,000
Booking.com
Listing site
Not published. Around 15%, negotiated per property £6,000
estimated rate
Airbnb
Listing site
15.5% single host fee, VAT included £6,200
Bedful
Booking software
£20 a month plus £1 per camping pitch, plus £100 setup £484
£384 after the first year
Anytime Booking Lite
Booking software
£10 a month plus 1% of bookings £520
Campsite Booking System
Booking software
£25 a month for 10 pitches, then £25 a year per extra pitch £350
Outdore Starter
Booking software
£1 a booking, or nothing if the guest pays the fee £250
Outdore Standard
Booking software
£31 a month, sites of 16 pitches or more only Not sold to sites under 16 pitches
HolidayFox
Booking software
£9.99 a month for the widget, or £12.99 with a website, plus 5% of direct bookings £2,119.88
CampManager
Booking software
Not published. You ask for a quote. No published price

Commission rows assume every booking comes through that listing site, which for most sites it does not. Put your own share in on the calculator. Commission is shown at what it actually costs a site that is not VAT registered, because a site taking £40,000 is below the £90,000 registration threshold and cannot reclaim any of it. Card processing is left out of every row, because you pay Stripe whichever route the booking takes.

Prices as published by each provider, checked 20 August 2026. If one of these has changed, tell us at hello@pitchdesk.co.uk and we will correct it.

See the same table with what each of them does better than us

Questions owners ask first

Do I have to leave Pitchup?
No, and for most sites that would be a mistake in year one. Keep the listing for people who have never heard of you. Send your own returning families and the traffic from your Google listing to your own booking form. You pay 15% on the bookings a listing site genuinely found for you and nothing on the ones that were already yours. The Pitchup comparison sets this out properly.
Where does the guest’s money go?
Into your Stripe account, directly. Stripe pays it into your bank account on their normal payout schedule. We never hold it, never route it and never take a cut of it. Stripe deducts its own processing fee, which is 1.4% and 20p on a UK card. How payments work.
What if I do not have a website?
You get a booking page we host at pitchdesk.co.uk/book/your-site. Put the link in your Facebook page, your Google Business Profile and your email signature. A five van CL can run its whole season on that page.
What happens when I cancel?
You cancel from your own settings page and the subscription stops at the end of the month you have paid for. Your bookings stay readable and you can export them. Because the payments were on your own Stripe account, nothing about the money changes.
Is £7.99 an introductory price?
It is the price. If it ever changes for new sites, the price you signed up on stays yours for as long as you keep the subscription running.

Try it on next season before you pay anything

Thirty days free with no card. Put your real pitches and real prices in, take a test booking through it, and see whether the guest journey holds up before you decide.

£7.99 a month

£95.88 a year. Any number of pitches. No commission on anything you take.

No card to start. Cancel from your own settings page.