Can You Charge Card Processing Fees to Campers?

Every month you get the same statement from your payment provider, and every month a chunk of your takings has quietly gone to Stripe or your card reader before it even reaches your bank account. It's a fair question that comes up in campsite Facebook groups all the time: can you just add a small card processing fee to a booking to cover it? The honest answer is no, not in the way most people mean it, and it's worth understanding exactly why before you put anything on your booking page that could land you in trouble.

This guide walks through what card processing actually costs a UK campsite, what the law actually says about surcharging guests, and the legitimate ways to protect your margin without upsetting the people you're trying to welcome.

What card processing actually costs a campsite

Taking payments online or through a card reader isn't free. Stripe's standard UK rate is typically around 1.5% plus 20p per successful transaction for a UK issued card, with a higher rate for cards issued overseas or premium cards like Amex. A card reader from a provider like SumUp or Square often works out similarly, sometimes with a flat percentage regardless of card type.

On a £90 weekend pitch fee, that's roughly £1.55 in fees. It doesn't sound like much on a single booking, but multiply it across a season of bookings on a busy touring park and it adds up to a genuine cost. It's completely understandable that owners want to recover it somehow.

Take a small touring park doing 600 bookings across a season at an average of £80 a booking. That's around £48,000 in takings, and at roughly 1.7% total cost including the per transaction fee, you'd be looking at close to £820 going to your payment provider over the year. That's a real number worth planning for in your pricing, not something to write off or ignore, and it's exactly why the question of surcharging comes up so often.

The law: why you can't just add a card fee at checkout

Here's the bit that catches a lot of people out. Since 13 January 2018, the Payment Services Regulations 2017 have banned businesses across the UK from adding a surcharge to consumer payments made by debit or credit card. This came in when the UK implemented the second Payment Services Directive, and it applies whether you call the extra charge a card fee, a processing fee, or an admin fee. If it's specifically triggered by the guest choosing to pay by card, it isn't allowed for consumer transactions.

It doesn't matter whether the payment is Visa, Mastercard, a debit card, or a credit card. It doesn't matter whether you take the payment online, over the phone, or through a card reader at the gate. If your guest is a private individual booking a pitch for their own use, which covers the vast majority of campsite bookings, you cannot charge them extra for using a card.

There is a narrow exception for commercial or business cards used in genuine business to business transactions, but this rarely applies to a family booking a weekend away. Trading Standards can act on breaches, and your payment provider's terms will usually prohibit it too, so it's not a grey area worth testing.

What you can legitimately do instead

None of this means you're stuck absorbing the cost with no options. There are several perfectly legal ways to protect your margin.

• Build it into your pitch price. The simplest fix. Work your average processing cost into your standard rates so it's spread across every booking rather than singled out at checkout. Guests never see a separate line item, and you're not caught out by the surcharge ban.
• Offer a genuine cash or bank transfer discount. A discount for paying by an alternative method is treated differently in law to a surcharge for paying by card, provided the discounted price is your genuine everyday price for that payment method rather than a token amount designed to disguise a card fee.
• Charge a booking or admin fee that applies to everyone. A flat fee that applies regardless of how the guest pays, covering the cost of taking and managing the booking, is a different thing entirely to a card surcharge. We've covered how to set one of these up sensibly in our guide to campsite booking fees.
• Negotiate your processing rate. Rates aren't always fixed. If you're taking a high volume of payments, it's worth asking your provider whether a better rate is available, or comparing Stripe against a card reader provider like SumUp or Square to see which suits your booking pattern best.
• Cut down on refunds and chargebacks. Every reversed payment costs you twice, the original processing fee and often a dispute fee on top. Tightening up your cancellation terms reduces this. Our guide to chargebacks and payment disputes covers this in more depth.

Being upfront with guests without breaking the rules

The safest, and honestly the least awkward, approach is to make your headline price the only price the guest ever sees. Nobody enjoys reaching the payment page and finding an extra line has appeared that wasn't mentioned when they picked their dates. If your pitch rate already reflects your true costs, including card processing, there's nothing to explain and nothing for a guest to query.

Where this trips owners up is language. Phrases like "card payments incur a 2% fee" on a booking page are the kind of thing that draws a complaint or a chargeback dispute, because guests increasingly know this isn't allowed and some will push back. If you do want a genuine cash discount, be clear that it's a discount for paying by an alternative method, not a penalty for paying by card, and make sure the "full price" you quote is one you'd actually charge someone paying by bank transfer, not an inflated figure invented purely to make the card price look like the real one.

Does site size change the answer?

On a CL or CS with five pitches, the pounds and pence from card fees feel more noticeable simply because your total takings are smaller, and cash still plays a bigger role for many small sites. It's worth still taking cards though, since plenty of guests now expect it and won't carry cash for a deposit. Building the fee into your nightly rate rather than trying to charge it separately keeps things simple and compliant.

On a medium or larger park taking hundreds of card payments a season, the total cost of processing is bigger in absolute terms, which makes it worth actively shopping your rate and reviewing your provider each year rather than sticking with whatever you signed up to when you started out.

How CampSuite handles payments and fees

CampSuite's built in Stripe integration takes card payments directly through your booking diary, so deposits and balances get collected automatically without you needing a separate card machine or a guest chasing spreadsheet. Processing costs show up clearly in your reports, so you always know exactly what you've been charged and can price accordingly, without ever being tempted to bolt on a surcharge that could land you in hot water. You can see how it all fits together on our payments feature page, and how it works alongside invoicing for VAT registered sites.

The bottom line

You can't legally charge UK campers extra for paying by debit or credit card, no matter what you call the fee. What you can do is build your processing cost sensibly into your pricing, offer a genuine discount for other payment methods, charge a fair booking fee that applies to everyone, and keep your provider's rate competitive. Get those basics right and the pennies per transaction stop feeling like something worth risking a guest's goodwill, or a Trading Standards letter, over.

If you're still juggling a card reader, a spreadsheet, and a paper diary to keep track of who's paid what, sign up for CampSuite's free plan and bring it all into one place. It's free for up to 100 pitches, takes about 15 minutes to set up, and there's no card required to get started.