Quick sums for anyone stacking OTAs this season.
Pitchup takes 15% of every booking it sends you, with 2.5% coming back if you are VAT-registered. Booking.com sits at 15–20%. Campsites.co.uk is 10% plus VAT. Once everything is added up, some parks are handing over close to a fifth of the booking value.
On a £300 pitch booking that is £45 to £60 gone before you have put the kettle on.
The part that is worth paying for
None of this is an argument that OTAs are a rip-off. For a genuinely new guest — one who had never heard of your site, searched for a pitch in your area, found you on a listing page and booked — a commission is a marketing cost with a measurable return. You paid £45 to acquire a customer you would not otherwise have had. That is a reasonable deal, and it is what the platforms are actually selling.
The problem is that the commission does not distinguish.
The part that is not
A large share of OTA bookings at most established sites are not new guests at all. They are:
- Returning guests who stayed last year and booked through the same route out of habit.
- People who were given your name by a friend, searched for you specifically, and clicked whichever link came up first.
- Guests who found you on your own website, then went to check reviews and booked from there instead.
Every one of those pays the same 15–20% as the genuinely new guest. You are paying an acquisition fee on a customer you had already acquired — in the third case, on one who was standing on your own booking page moments earlier.
Do the sum for your own site
The number that matters is not the commission rate. It is the share of your OTA bookings that were people who already knew your name. Nobody can tell you that except your own records, and it is worth an evening finding out:
- Pull your OTA bookings for last season.
- Mark every guest who had stayed with you before.
- Mark every one who booked a specific pitch type or asked for a specific spot — people who know the site.
- Multiply what is left by your average booking value and the commission rate.
That last figure is your genuine acquisition cost. Everything above it is the amount you paid to take a booking you already had.
What direct costs instead
We built HolidayPitches the other way round. No monthly fee, no setup fee, and 1% per booking — more only if you switch on extra modules such as food ordering. You pay when a booking actually happens, and nothing ticks over while the site is quiet in January.
On that same £300 pitch booking, 1% is £3.
The realistic position
Very few sites should drop OTAs entirely, and we would not suggest it. They fill midweek gaps, they reach people who have never heard of you, and walking away from that reach to save commission is usually a false economy.
The sensible position is the one most well-run parks land on: keep the OTAs for discovery, and make sure that everyone who already knows your name has an easy, obvious, lower-friction way to book direct. Returning guests in particular will almost always take the direct route if it is put in front of them — they are only using the platform because it is the path they remember.
If most of your bookings these days are direct rather than through an OTA, it is genuinely worth doing the sum on what you are paying to take them. The answer surprises people.