HolidayFox vs Canopy & Stars

First thing to say: Canopy & Stars and HolidayFox aren't really the same kind of thing.

Canopy & Stars is a curated glamping marketplace and a consumer-facing booking platform that drives guests to your site. You pay them commission on each booking they send you, and in return you get distribution, brand association, and access to their audience. They're not selling you software; they're selling you customers.

HolidayFox is the PMS — diary, website checkout on your domain, after-hours live chat, Google Hotels. Canopy & Stars is a discovery marketplace. Keep them for guests who do not know you yet. Returning guests and people who googled your name should book on your site. Pricing: free for the widget, or from £12.99/month for a full website plus 5% commission on bookings taken through HolidayFox on bookings taken through HolidayFox — not zero.

So this page isn't really "HolidayFox vs Canopy & Stars" in the way a comparison page usually works. It's about whether, alongside Canopy & Stars, you should be taking more bookings direct on your own site, and what that looks like.

What Canopy & Stars actually does for you

Canopy & Stars is a marketplace owned by Sawday's. They curate glamping and outdoor stays: yurts, treehouses, shepherd's huts, safari tents, cabins, and present them to a UK consumer audience that's actively looking for that kind of holiday.

Things they do genuinely well:

• •Brand association. Being on Canopy & Stars confers credibility. Guests trust the curation.
• •Real consumer audience. They've built an email list and an SEO footprint over many years. They genuinely send bookings to the sites they list.
• •Beautiful editorial. Their photography and copywriting standards are high, which lifts your listing too.
• •UK-focused. Most of their audience is domestic, which matches where most UK glamping demand sits.

If you're trying to launch a new glamping site and you're not on Canopy & Stars, it's worth considering them. They're a credible discovery channel.

Where it starts to hurt

The friction with marketplace distribution shows up over time, and it's not unique to Canopy & Stars, the same pattern shows up with Airbnb, Hipcamp, and any other consumer platform that sits between you and your guest.

• •• The commission compounds. Marketplace commissions on glamping vary by platform and by your individual agreement, and can run to double digits. On a £180/night cabin booked for 3 nights, a fee at that level is real money to the marketplace on a single booking — check your own Canopy & Stars terms for your rate.
• •• You don't own the guest. When a guest who first found you on Canopy & Stars comes back for a second stay, they often re-book through the marketplace, partly because it's familiar, partly because the marketplace nudges them to. You pay the commission again on a guest who already knows you.
• •• Your brand traffic gets converted by them. Some guests Google "your-glamping-site Cotswolds" and land on the Canopy & Stars listing rather than your own site, because their domain ranks higher. They then book through C&S and you pay the commission on a guest who explicitly searched for your name.

This is the structural friction of marketplace distribution. It's not bad faith on Canopy & Stars' part. This is how marketplaces work. The question is whether it's in your long-term interest to send all your bookings through them, including the ones you would have earned anyway.

What HolidayFox actually offers

We're the reservation book on your own WordPress site (or Website in a Box). We're not Canopy & Stars: they send discovery traffic; we take the booking when the guest already wants you. free for the widget, or from £12.99/month for a full website plus 5% commission on bookings taken through HolidayFox on stays taken through HolidayFox.

In practice, the typical journey for a glamping operator working with us looks like this:

• •Stay on Canopy & Stars (and any other marketplaces you use) for new-guest discovery, they're good at that.
• •Have HolidayFox running on your own WordPress site as the primary booking engine. Same domain. 5% commission on bookings taken through HolidayFox — not a marketplace cut, and not zero.
• •Direct your social media, Instagram bio, email newsletter, business cards, returning-guest emails, anything you control, to your own site, not your marketplace listing.
• •Over time the share of bookings on your own site should grow if you point social, email and returning guests at your domain. We do not publish a percentage until a named partner has agreed the quote.

The numbers add up quickly. As an illustration, a glamping site doing £80k/year of marketplace revenue at, say, an 18% commission would pay around £14,400 in fees. Shifting half of that to direct over a year could recover roughly £7,000 — comfortably more than HolidayFox costs.

When to stay on Canopy & Stars (and when to add direct)

• •• You're brand new, your own site has no traffic yet, and discovery is the priority.
• •• You don't have time or interest in marketing your own site at all, and you're happy to pay commission for someone else to do it.
• •• Your unit count is tiny and the commission absolute value is small enough not to bother you.
• •Your site is already getting some traffic from social, email, returning guests, or organic search.
• •Your commission bill is approaching or exceeding the cost of running a proper direct-booking setup.
• •You have repeat guests and want to keep them on your own list rather than the marketplace's.
• •You want to build a brand that exists independently of any marketplace.

The honest take: for most established glamping operators, the answer isn't to leave Canopy & Stars, it's to run them alongside a proper direct-booking setup so they stop being the only door.

Talk to us

15 minutes with Hannah. She'll ask three or four questions about your site, your traffic, and your current marketplace mix , and give you a straight answer about whether direct bookings would meaningfully change the maths for you. If they wouldn't, she'll say so.