Seasonal pricing for campsites: a practical guide

Plenty of campsites still run one flat nightly rate from March to October. It feels simple and fair. It is also the most expensive pricing mistake in the industry, because it underprices the nights everyone wants and overprices the nights nobody does.

Start from demand, not from the calendar

Before touching a spreadsheet, look at last year's bookings and answer three questions:

• Which weeks did you turn people away?
• Which weeks were half empty at your current price?
• When did each school holiday actually fall?

Your seasons should follow those answers. Most UK sites end up with something like four to six bands: low season, mid season, high season, and peak (the summer holidays and bank holiday weekends). If you draw the lines around demand rather than around calendar months, you have done the hard part.

Price the gaps between bands honestly

A common pattern is a £2 difference between low and peak. That is not seasonal pricing, it is a rounding error. On most sites the honest gap between a January-booked August Saturday and a quiet April midweek is 60 to 100 percent.

A worked example for a standard grass pitch:

• Low season midweek: £18
• Mid season: £24
• High season: £32
• Peak (school summer holidays): £38 to £42

Guests do not resent this. They live with it every time they book a train ticket or a cottage. What they resent is finding out the price after they have filled in a form and waited two days for a reply.

Weekends are a season of their own

Friday and Saturday nights in June can outsell a Tuesday in August. If your system only supports monthly seasons, you cannot express that, and you leave money on the busiest nights of the week. Look for pricing that lets you set a weekend uplift within a season, or override individual dates for events like a local festival.

Minimum stays protect your peak weeks

The other half of seasonal pricing is stay length. A single Saturday night booked in an August week can block a family that wanted the whole week. Sensible defaults:

• Peak weeks: minimum 3 to 7 nights.
• Bank holiday weekends: minimum 2 to 3 nights.
• Everything else: no minimum, take whatever comes.

The mistakes to avoid

1. Changing prices for existing bookings. A price rise applies to new bookings only. Honour what people booked at.
2. Ten price bands. Beyond about six, guests cannot predict what a stay costs and you cannot remember why the bands exist.
3. Forgetting the extras. If electricity, awnings and dogs are priced separately, keep those flat across the year. One moving number is enough.
4. Copying the site down the road. Their costs and their demand are not yours. Use them as a sanity check, not a strategy.

Review once a year, in autumn

Set aside one afternoon after the season ends. Pull up occupancy by week, nudge the bands where you turned people away, and open bookings for next year while this summer's guests still remember the trip. Sites that open early capture the loyal bookings before the January listing-site rush.

In Pillowcase, seasons and weekend rates are first-class features: you set the bands once, the booking page quotes every stay correctly, and daily overrides handle the odd event week. However you manage it, stop selling August for the price of March.