Every way a UK campsite can take a booking
Published prices for the listing sites and the booking systems a UK campsite chooses between, the sum done on the same site each time, and an honest line about what each one does better than we do. Two of them are cheaper than us in some situations and this page says which.
| Provider | What they charge | A year at 12 pitches | Where they beat us |
|---|---|---|---|
| PitchDesk Booking software |
£7.99 a month, any number of pitches | £95.88 | One flat price, your own Stripe account and your own terms. |
| Pitchup Listing site |
15% commission | £6,000 | An audience of campers who have never heard of you, and nothing to pay until one of them books. |
| Campsites.co.uk Listing site |
10% commission plus VAT | £4,800 | The only listing site here that keeps your own deposit and cancellation terms, at the lowest commission of the four. |
| Hipcamp Listing site |
12.5% commission plus VAT, and Stripe on top | £6,000 | Reach for glamping and unusual pitches, with payment straight into your own Stripe account. |
| Booking.com Listing site |
Not published. Around 15%, negotiated per property | £6,000 estimated rate |
The largest audience here, including people who would never look at a camping site. |
| Airbnb Listing site |
15.5% single host fee, VAT included | £6,200 | No rate parity clause at all, so you may legally price your own website below it. |
| Bedful Booking software |
£20 a month plus £1 per camping pitch, plus £100 setup | £484 £384 after the first year |
An established booking system with a longer track record than ours, and no commission either. |
| Anytime Booking Lite Booking software |
£10 a month plus 1% of bookings | £520 | A long list of channel integrations, including Campsites.co.uk, which we do not have. |
| Campsite Booking System Booking software |
£25 a month for 10 pitches, then £25 a year per extra pitch | £350 | Priced for small sites, and the per pitch charge above ten pitches is yearly rather than monthly. |
| Outdore Starter Booking software |
£1 a booking, or nothing if the guest pays the fee | £250 | Cheaper than us below about 96 bookings a year, and the £1 can be passed to the guest. |
| Outdore Standard Booking software |
£31 a month, sites of 16 pitches or more only | Not sold to sites under 16 pitches | Built for larger parks, and it has an app of its own that waives commission on repeat guests. |
| HolidayFox Booking software |
£9.99 a month for the widget, or £12.99 with a website, plus 5% of direct bookings | £2,119.88 | The £12.99 plan builds you a website as well as taking the bookings. We do not build websites. |
| CampManager Booking software |
Not published. You ask for a quote. | No published price | Full park management for a large park, including the parts a booking form never touches. |
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.
Two different things are in that table
A listing site sells you demand. Pitchup, Campsites.co.uk, Hipcamp, Booking.com and Airbnb put your pitches in front of campers who have never heard of you, and they charge a percentage of every booking that comes through them. If you switch one off, some bookings stop arriving.
Booking software sells you a system. Bedful, Anytime Booking, Campsite Booking System, Outdore, HolidayFox, CampManager and PitchDesk take the booking, the deposit and the terms, on your own website. If you switch one off, the bookings still exist and you go back to the phone and the diary.
Most sites need both, and the useful question is how much of your season each one is paying for. There are 5 listing sites and 8 booking systems in the table above.
How to read the money column
Every figure is the same site: 12 pitches taking £40,000 a year across about 250 bookings, with all of it going through the listing site in the commission rows.
That last assumption flatters nobody. Put your own share in on the calculator and the commission rows fall.
Cool Camping is not on this list
Hipcamp announced the acquisition in January 2022 and completed it that May, migrating around 25,000 pitches. coolcamping.com now redirects to Hipcamp. If you are still thinking of Cool Camping as an independent option, it has not been one since 2022.
The part nobody puts in a comparison table
Commission is the number owners argue about. Control is the thing that actually decides how you can run your site, and it is written into the terms rather than the pricing page.
| Channel | What they take | Price your own site lower? | Whose terms bind the camper | Deposit and balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pitchup | 15% commission | Your own website, app, phone and policies | Pitchup's | Theirs. The 15% is the deposit |
| Booking.com | Not published. Around 15%, negotiated per property | The United Kingdom is a narrow parity country | Property policies, inside their parity terms | Per rate plan, inside their parity terms |
| Hipcamp | 12.5% commission plus VAT, and Stripe on top | Best price covenant covering your own website | Hipcamp's | None. The camper pays in full |
| Campsites.co.uk | 10% commission plus VAT | No clause, but the integration refuses price uplifts | Yours | Yours, mirrored from your own policy |
| Airbnb | 15.5% single host fee, VAT included | None. The word does not appear in their UK terms | Airbnb's | None. The camper pays in full |
| PitchDesk | £7.99 a month, any number of pitches | None | Yours | Yours |
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.
The United Kingdom is a rate parity island
Booking.com's public position is that it no longer uses parity clauses in Europe. Read the scope: the change covers the European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom left the EEA. The general delivery terms served to a British registration list the United Kingdom among the narrow parity countries, and require "the same or better rates" and "the same or better restrictions and policies such as reservation changes and cancellation policy" as the property makes available itself.
Hipcamp goes further. Their landowner terms have a UK and European host covenant that the listing price "will be the same as or lower than the price you offer end users of your own website or third-party websites".
Pitchup's parity clause covers your website, your app and your telephone bookings, and your payment, amendment and cancellation policies with them.
Campsites.co.uk has no parity clause we can find, but its integration does not allow price uplifts, which comes to the same thing in practice.
Airbnb is the exception. The word parity does not appear in their UK terms of service at all.
What that means for a campsite owner
On four of the five channels above you cannot advertise a cheaper price on your own website than the one on the listing. Since price is off the table, what moves a booking to your own site is simply having somewhere to book at all.
Which is the argument for a booking form of your own, at the same price, that costs you nothing per booking.
Check it yourself
Every clause above is in terms you have already agreed to. Open your own agreement with each channel and search it for the word parity. It takes ten minutes and it is the ten minutes that changes how you price next season.
Where a competitor is cheaper than us
A comparison page where the writer wins every row is not worth reading. Two of the systems above beat us on price in real situations.
Outdore Starter
£1 a booking, or nothing if the guest pays the fee. There is no monthly fee, so a site taking 40 bookings a year pays £40, against our £95.88.
The break-even is about 96 bookings a year. Below that they are cheaper. Above it we are, and the gap grows with every booking you take. They also let you pass the £1 to the guest, which makes it free to the owner.
If you run a five van CL with a short season, look at them honestly before you look at us.
HolidayFox
£9.99 a month for the widget, or £12.99 with a website, plus 5% of direct bookings. Their higher plan builds you a website as well as taking bookings, and we do not build websites.
The catch is the 5%, and it is charged on your direct bookings. On £40,000 of direct bookings that is £2,000 a year on top of the subscription, which is the thing you were trying to stop paying.
If you have no website at all and want one built for you, they are worth a look. If you have a website already, the 5% is hard to justify.
When PitchDesk is the wrong answer
There are sites we should not be selling to. If one of these is you, one of the others in the table will serve you better.
| If this is you | What to do instead |
|---|---|
| You are listed on Booking.com, Airbnb and Pitchup at once | You need a channel manager to keep availability in step across all of them. We do not have one, and running us alongside three channels means updating four calendars by hand. |
| You have a shop, a bar and a till | Look at a full park management system. Ask CampManager for a quote. |
| You have 40 seasonal vans and owner statements to produce | Same answer. Seasonal pitch accounting is a different product from a booking form. |
| You take fewer than 96 bookings a year | Outdore's £1 a booking is cheaper than £95.88. We would rather tell you that than have you work it out in March. |
| You want no fixed cost at all in a bad year | A listing site charges you nothing until a booking arrives. We charge £7.99 in a wet August with an empty field. That is a real difference and only you can price it. |
| You want someone to answer a telephone | Our support is email. If you need to ring a person about a booking at nine in the evening, ask the others what their support hours are before you decide. |
The comparisons in detail
PitchDesk and Pitchup
The 15%, the parity clause that binds your own website, and the balance payment that gets one attempt.
PitchDesk and CampManager
What a park management system does that we do not, and who should buy one.
PitchDesk and Bedful
Two commission-free systems. The difference is the per pitch charge and the setup fee.
Check our arithmetic on your own numbers
The calculator uses the published prices in the table above and shows every step of the sum.
£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.