Should You Charge a Booking Fee at Your Campsite?

Every few months a version of the same question turns up in campsite owner Facebook groups: should I add a campsite booking fee on top of my pitch price? Usually it starts because someone has just eaten a card processing charge on a big group booking, or spent a whole bank holiday weekend chasing a guest who never showed up. It is a fair question, and there is no single right answer. What works for a 40 pitch touring park with a busy online diary will not always suit a two pitch CL where every guest is practically a regular. Let's go through it properly, so you can make a decision that fits your site rather than copying whatever the loudest voice in the group says.

What a booking fee actually is

It helps to be precise here, because "booking fee" gets used loosely and it is easy to confuse it with a deposit. A deposit is money that goes towards the guest's stay, usually a percentage of the total, taken to secure the pitch and often non refundable if they cancel late. A booking fee is different. It is a separate, non refundable charge added on top of the pitch price, purely for the act of making the booking. The guest still pays their full nightly rate as normal. The fee just covers the cost and effort of taking that payment online.

If you already run a deposit policy, it is worth reading alongside our campsite deposit policy guide, because the two work well together rather than being an either-or choice.

The case for charging a booking fee

There are three reasons most owners consider one, and they are all practical rather than about squeezing extra profit out of guests.

• It covers your card processing costs. Every online card payment you take through Stripe or a similar processor carries a small percentage fee. On a low value one night stay that fee barely registers. On a week long stay for a family of five with an awning and two dogs, it adds up, and most owners simply absorb it as a cost of doing business. A small booking fee can offset that without changing your headline pitch price.
• It discourages speculative bookings. Guests who are genuinely committed to visiting are far less put off by a small fee than guests who are holding three sites at once "just in case" while they decide. A booking fee, even a modest one, tends to filter out the second group.
• It funds your no-show buffer. If you have ever had a pitch sit empty on a sold out weekend because a guest simply did not turn up, you will know how much that costs. A booking fee, alongside a sensible cancellation policy, gives you a small pot to offset the lost revenue when it happens. It will not cover it all, but it takes the edge off.

The case against charging a booking fee

None of this is one sided, and there are good reasons plenty of well run sites choose not to charge one.

• Guests compare total prices, not headline prices. If a guest is choosing between your site and a similar one nearby, and yours shows an extra £3 fee at checkout while the other does not, you can lose the booking on principle even if your overall price is competitive. People notice fees far more than they notice a few pounds difference in the nightly rate.
• It can feel like nickel and diming. Camping and touring guests, especially the loyal, repeat visiting kind that small sites rely on, often expect a straightforward relationship with the site owner. A booking fee, poorly explained, can read as exactly the kind of hidden charge people go camping to get away from.
• It adds friction at the worst possible moment. The last thing you want during checkout is a guest hesitating over an unexpected line item and abandoning the booking altogether. If your online booking conversion rate matters to you, every extra charge is a small extra chance to lose the sale.

How much should you actually charge?

If you decide a booking fee is right for your site, keep it modest and predictable. Most UK sites that use one land in one of two structures:

• A flat fee, typically somewhere between £1 and £5 per booking, regardless of stay length. This is the simplest to explain and the easiest for guests to accept, since it does not scale up alarmingly on longer stays.
• A small percentage, usually 1.5% to 3%, roughly in line with card processing costs. This scales fairly with booking value but can look intimidating on a big invoice unless you are clear about what it covers.

Whichever you choose, resist the temptation to treat it as a profit centre. A booking fee that is obviously more than your actual card costs invites exactly the guest pushback described above, and it undermines the "this just covers our costs" explanation that makes a fee feel reasonable in the first place.

How to introduce a fee without upsetting anyone

If you decide to go ahead, how you communicate it matters more than the amount itself.

• Show the full price upfront. Nobody minds a fee they saw coming. Everybody minds one that appears at the final step. Make sure your booking system displays the total price, fee included, as early in the journey as possible.
• Explain it in one short sentence. "A small booking fee helps us cover secure card payment costs" does more good than any amount of small print. Guests are generally reasonable about costs they understand.
• Apply it consistently. Nothing damages trust faster than a fee that appears for some guests and not others, or that a returning guest remembers differently from last year. Set it once in your system and let it apply the same way to every booking.
• Tell existing guests before you change anything. If you are adding a fee to a site that has never had one, a short heads up in your seasonal newsletter or on your booking page avoids the fee looking sneaky when regulars notice it for the first time.

Alternatives if you decide against a booking fee

A booking fee is not the only way to solve the problems it is meant to solve. If you would rather keep your pricing simple, consider:

• Building the cost into your nightly rate. A few pence added across the board achieves the same financial outcome without a visible extra line item.
• Relying on a firm deposit and cancellation policy to deal with no-shows, rather than a fee on every booking.
• Absorbing card costs as a marketing expense. Many sites view the cost of taking card payments the same way they view the cost of a booking platform: a necessary part of making it easy for guests to pay, and one that pays for itself in extra bookings and fewer cash handling headaches.

Whichever route you take, keeping your payment methods simple and clearly explained tends to matter far more to guests than whether there is a small fee attached.

The bottom line

There is no universally correct answer here, and any campsite owner who tells you otherwise is probably describing their own site rather than yours. A small, clearly explained booking fee can genuinely help sites that take a high volume of online card payments or that get burned by no-shows during peak weekends. For quieter, more personal sites where every guest is closer to a regular, keeping pricing simple often matters more than recovering a few pounds of processing cost.

What matters most is that whatever you choose, guests see the true total price early, understand why it is there if it exists, and never feel like it was hidden from them. Get that right and a booking fee, if you use one, becomes a non issue rather than a source of one star reviews.

If you are reviewing how payments work across your site, from card processing to deposits and invoicing, try CampSuite free today. It takes about 15 minutes to set up and it is free for CL and CS sites.