A lot of UK holiday sites don't start as holiday sites. They start as a working farm with a field that isn't earning its keep, and someone deciding to put five pitches on it to see what happens.

That's the Certificated Location route — up to 5 units at a time under the Caravan and Motorhome Club's rules — and it's a genuinely low-risk way to test whether a piece of land can support paying guests before committing to planning permission, a full site licence and the infrastructure that comes with it. The Glamping Show's own trade coverage this year keeps landing on the same theme: interest in diversifying agricultural land into glamping and small-scale touring pitches is still rising, driven by the same pressures — thin farming margins, rural land that's hard to make productive any other way, and steady demand for UK-based short breaks that doesn't look like slowing down.

The bit nobody budgets for at CL scale

Five pitches bring in real but modest money, especially in the first season or two. That's exactly the scale at which a £100–£200 a month booking system stops making sense — you can lose a meaningful chunk of what a CL earns in the quiet months just keeping the software switched on, whether or not anyone books. It's also why so many CL owners still run bookings from a phone, a paper diary and a shared spreadsheet: not because they don't know better, but because every option they looked at was priced for a 60-pitch site, not a 5-pitch field.

The other cost that's easy to miss: most of those systems ask for a setup fee or a contract before you've taken a single booking, which is a strange thing to ask of a diversification project that's explicitly meant to be low-risk.

What actually matters at this stage

  • Nothing to pay until a guest pays you. A pay-as-you-go model — a small percentage per booking, nothing when the field's empty — matches how a CL actually earns.
  • Room to grow without switching systems. If the CL works and you go on to apply for a full site licence, moving from 5 pitches to 25 shouldn't mean re-platforming everything and re-training however you handle bookings.
  • A branded booking page from day one. Guests searching for a small, characterful site respond to seeing it presented properly — a proper booking calendar with live availability reads as a serious, established site, whatever else is or isn't finished yet.
  • Simple guest logistics. A CL rarely has full-time staff on site. A gate code or pitch details a guest can get from their phone, rather than a call to the farmhouse, matters more here than at a bigger, staffed park.

The practical starting point

HolidayPitches charges nothing to set up and nothing monthly — just 1% per booking, more only if you switch on extra modules like food ordering, so a CL earns exactly what it earns without a fixed cost sitting against it in January. The same account scales with you: add pitches, add a glamping pod or two, and eventually move up to a full licensed site without starting again on a different platform. See the glamping and small-site setup, or register your CL or field free to try it against your own pitches before committing to anything.