Pitchup vs direct bookings

Pitchup costs up to 15% of every booking once base commission, Featured listings, and payment processing are stacked.

HolidayFox costs the same flat monthly subscription regardless of how many bookings you take. For a typical UK campsite, that subscription works out at roughly 5% of revenue — and the percentage drops as your revenue grows because the subscription doesn't scale linearly with bookings.

Net swing on the same revenue: about 10 percentage points in your favour on every booking you take direct rather than through Pitchup.

On a campsite doing £60,000 a year that swing is worth around £6,000 annually — enough to pay for a quiet-season heating upgrade, a new shower block roof, or six months of part-time admin help.

Pitchup's headline commission for UK campsites is 10–12% on total booking value. That's the number most operators quote when asked.

Once you add the things that almost always come with a real listing, the effective rate climbs:

• •Featured listings for visibility in well-trafficked regions: ~1–2 additional percentage points effective.
• •Payment processing built into the net payout: ~1.5–2 percentage points.

Stack those on top of 12% base and you're at roughly 15% all-in. For a campsite in a competitive region (Cornwall, Lake District, Pembrokeshire), this is the real number — not the 10% headline.

HolidayFox is a flat monthly subscription. We don't take commission. The reason it works out at roughly 5% of revenue for a typical UK campsite is arithmetic:

• •A modest UK campsite turning over £40,000 a year on the HolidayFox plan that fits its size pays roughly £2,000 a year in subscription. That's ~5%.
• •A larger campsite doing £100,000 a year typically pays a slightly higher subscription tier (more pitches) but not proportionally. Effective rate falls to ~3%.
• •A small site doing £20,000 a year pays at the bottom tier — effective rate around 7–8%, still meaningfully below Pitchup.

Worth being explicit about what's not in the 5%: Stripe (or another card processor) takes its standard fee on each transaction, typically 1.4% + 20p for UK cards. That fee exists either way — Pitchup absorbs it into their payment processing line; with direct bookings you pay it to Stripe directly and see the line on your statement. Net-net, no difference.

Tell us what you turn over and we'll quote your exact HolidayFox monthly fee on a 15-minute call. The headline numbers in this article are illustrative; your actual rate depends on pitch count and any optional add-ons.

Leaving Pitchup entirely usually isn't the right move — they genuinely do drive new-guest discovery and it's hard to replace that cold. What works is adding a direct-booking layer on your own website so guests who already know about you (returning guests, Google traffic, word-of-mouth, social, the campsite-down-the-road conversations) can book without going through Pitchup.

Most of our campsite customers shift from ~80% Pitchup / 20% direct to roughly 50% / 50% over a season. The maths on a £60k campsite making that shift:

Recovery scales with revenue. A £100k campsite making the same shift saves ~£5,500. A £180k campsite saves ~£10,500.

Repeat guests. Roughly 25–35% of campsite bookings at established UK sites are returning guests. When those guests re-book through Pitchup — and most do, because that's where they booked the first time — you pay 15% on a guest you didn't need help finding.

Over a 5-year period, a £60k campsite typically pays Pitchup somewhere around £8,000–£12,000 in commission on guests who would have booked direct if the option had been visible to them. That cost is real but doesn't show up as a line item anywhere — it's just invisible leakage.

A direct-booking channel on your own site is what lets you capture those repeat guests properly. Email them when they return, send them a discount code their second time, remember their pitch preference. Things Pitchup structurally can't do for you.