How to choose a campsite booking system

I have been on both sides of this decision. My family's site worked through most of the off-the-shelf booking systems before I started building our own, and now I build one for a living. So take this as informed but obviously interested advice, and hold every vendor, including us, to the same questions.

Start with your awkwardest booking

Every system demos beautifully with a two-night stay on a standard pitch. The differences show up at the edges. Before you look at a single product, write down your three most awkward real bookings from last season. Ours were things like:

• A seasonal pitch paid in instalments.
• A rally of eight units that wanted to camp together.
• A guest who moved dates twice, added a dog, then cancelled half the stay.

In every demo, make the salesperson do those three bookings while you watch. You will learn more in twenty minutes than from any feature list.

The questions that separate systems

Who owns the guest? If the system runs your bookings through its own marketplace, check whether you can export your guest list and email them yourself. If you cannot, you are renting your own customers.

Where does the money go? Payments should land in an account in your name, not sit in the platform's balance until a weekly payout. Ask what happens to refunds after the payout, and who eats the card fee on a cancellation.

What does a price change take? You will adjust prices every season, sometimes mid-season. If a change means emailing support, that is a red flag.

Does the calendar cope with your channels? If you list on Pitchup or similar, ask exactly how availability syncs, how fast, and what happens in the seconds when both sides sell the same pitch. "We have an integration" is not an answer; make them show the overbooking case.

Can the person who covers reception on Saturdays use it? The test is not whether you can learn it. It is whether a new seasonal staff member can take a phone booking correctly on their second shift.

Read the pricing twice

Booking system pricing hides in three places:

1. Commission. A "free" system taking 3 to 6 percent of bookings costs a mid-size site thousands per season.
2. Card processing markup. Some platforms add their own margin on top of the card fee. Compare against Stripe's published rates.
3. Per-booking fees passed to guests. These make your prices look worse than the site down the road and guests notice at checkout.

Work out the total cost at your real booking volume, not the headline price. A flat monthly fee, like ours, suits busy sites; commission can suit very small ones. Do the arithmetic for your numbers.

Moving is easier than staying put

The strongest force in this decision is inertia: the dread of migrating a season of bookings. Any vendor worth considering will move your existing bookings across for you, and the quiet months are the time to do it. A clunky system does not just cost you admin hours. It quietly costs you every guest who gave up on a slow booking page, and you never see those in a report.

Whatever you choose, choose deliberately. The system you pick will touch every guest, every payment and every day of your season.