Canopy & Stars cost breakdown 2026

The short version

Canopy & Stars takes 15-22% commission on UK glamping bookings, with the exact rate depending on your agreement, length of tenure, and where you sit in the curation tier.

For a typical glamping site turning over £60,000 a year through Canopy & Stars, that's £9,000 to £13,200 going to the marketplace annually.

Canopy & Stars is unique among UK accommodation marketplaces because of the curation and brand association, but the commission economics are still meaningful.

HolidayFox direct bookings are 5% commission. Keep Canopy & Stars for curation and discovery; add direct on your own site with iCal keeping every channel in sync.

1. The base commission

Canopy & Stars is owned by Sawday's and operates as a curated glamping marketplace. They don't list every glamping site, only those that meet their editorial bar. Commission for accepted properties typically falls in the 15-18% range as a baseline.

Newer listings and properties in less-trafficked categories sometimes pay closer to 20-22%. The exact rate is negotiated per property and depends on supply/demand dynamics at the moment of signing.

Commission is on the total booking value, including any extras the guest pays at booking (linen fee, dog fee, experience add-ons). Like all marketplace commissions, it applies to the gross, not the net.

2. The curation premium (what you're actually paying for)

Canopy & Stars' commission is higher than Pitchup and lower than Sykes, and the value proposition is qualitatively different from both. What you're really paying for is:

• •• Editorial curation. Canopy & Stars vets every property. Being listed signals quality to guests in a way generic OTAs can't replicate.
• •• Brand association with Sawday's. A pre-built audience that already trusts the Sawday's taste for hospitality.
• •• Strong photography and copywriting. Their editorial team produces listings that often outperform what a small operator could do themselves.
• •• UK-specific consumer audience. Their audience is largely domestic, predominantly affluent midweek and weekend travellers, exactly the right demographic for most UK glamping economics.

None of this is fake value. The question isn't whether to be on Canopy & Stars, for most glamping operators, the answer is yes, at least at launch. The question is how much of your total booking volume should flow through them long-term.

3. The compounding cost

Two patterns make Canopy & Stars' cost compound over time:

Pattern 1: Repeat guests pay commission again

When a guest who originally found you on Canopy & Stars re-books, they usually go back through Canopy & Stars , partly because it's familiar, partly because Canopy & Stars marketing nudges them to. You pay the commission again on a guest you no longer need help finding.

In glamping specifically, repeat-guest rates are unusually high: 25-40% of bookings at established sites are returning guests. The commission on those repeat bookings is one of the cleanest economic wins in moving them to direct.

Pattern 2: Brand-search traffic gets converted by them

Guests Googling your site name often land on the Canopy & Stars listing rather than your own site (their domain authority is high). They then book through Canopy & Stars and you pay commission on a guest who explicitly searched for your name. This is the most economically visible friction with marketplace distribution.

What this looks like at different revenue levels

For glamping sites with multiple units, these numbers scale quickly. A 6-cabin site averaging £25k revenue per cabin is sending ~£25k,£33k a year to Canopy & Stars.

What most glamping operators do about it

Three patterns we see:

• •Stay 100% on Canopy & Stars. Works at launch and for sites that don't have any independent brand or audience. Pays the curation premium happily for the audience C&S provides.
• •Hybrid: Canopy & Stars plus direct. Stay listed on C&S for new-guest discovery, keep the editorial value and the curation halo, but build direct booking on your own website so returning guests, social media, and brand-search traffic don't pay commission. Most established glamping sites we work with shift from ~90% C&S / 10% direct to closer to 60/40 over 12-18 months. Annual recovery on a £60k C&S business is typically £2,500-£4,000.
• •Leave Canopy & Stars. Rare. Editorial association is hard to replace, and once you're off the platform, your brand search starts showing other glamping sites in the same area before it shows you. For most operators, this isn't the right move.

Pattern (2) is what HolidayFox helps with: 5% commission on direct, Canopy & Stars unchanged, all channels on one iCal calendar. With glamping's high repeat-guest rate, that hybrid is often the strongest economic win in the sector.

Work out what you're actually paying

15 minutes with Hannah. She'll work through your numbers , including the repeat-guest economics, and tell you whether adding a direct channel alongside Canopy & Stars is worth doing.