A 10 percentage point swing in your favour
Pitchup costs up to 15% of every booking once base commission, Featured listings, and payment processing are stacked.
HolidayFox charges 5% commission on direct bookings through your own website. You keep Pitchup (and Airbnb, Booking.com, whatever you use) for discovery; calendars stay in sync via iCal so you run every channel side by side.
Net swing on the same revenue: about 10 percentage points in your favour on every booking you take direct rather than through Pitchup, from the first booking, not after a full migration.
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:
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 charges 5% commission on bookings taken through your own website. That's the headline rate , not a blended average. Pitchup at 15% all-in vs HolidayFox at 5% is the comparison that matters.
You don't leave Pitchup to use HolidayFox. You add direct alongside it: Pitchup for new-guest discovery, your website for everyone who already knows you, one calendar via bidirectional iCal so nothing double-books. That hybrid , not platform exit, is where the money is.
Stripe still takes its standard card-processing fee on each transaction (typically 1.4% + 20p for UK cards). That exists either way; Pitchup rolls it into their stack. Net-net, no meaningful difference between channels.
Tell us your pitch count and turnover on a 15-minute call and we'll walk through how 5% direct fits next to Pitchup for your site.
What 10 percentage points of swing looks like in real money, comparing Pitchup at 15% all-in vs HolidayFox at 5% commission + £12.99/month subscription (£155.88/year).
| Annual revenue | Pitchup all-in (15%) | HolidayFox (5% + £156) | Annual saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 | £3,000 | £1,156 | £1,844 |
| £40,000 | £6,000 | £2,156 | £3,844 |
| £60,000 | £9,000 | £3,156 | £5,844 |
| £100,000 | £15,000 | £5,156 | £9,844 |
| £180,000 | £27,000 | £9,156 | £17,844 |
These are the numbers if you shifted all your bookings from Pitchup to direct. Most operators don't and shouldn't, Pitchup is good at new-guest discovery, and leaving the platform entirely would lose that. The realistic comparison sits in the next section.
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 100% via Pitchup to roughly 50% Pitchup / 50% direct over a season. The maths on a £60k campsite making that shift:
Recovery scales with revenue. A £100k campsite making the same shift saves ~£4,800. A £180k campsite saves ~£8,800. These are pure cost savings, the typical 10-20% lift in total bookings that comes from making direct booking easy on your own site is on top.
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.