Every booking system you look at will ask you the same question sooner or later: do you want guests to book instantly, or do you want to approve every request yourself? It sounds like a small setting buried in an admin panel, but it shapes how your whole season runs. Instant book fills pitches while you sleep. Request to book means nothing gets confirmed until you've had a look. Neither is automatically right, and the answer for a five pitch CL is often the opposite of the answer for a sixty pitch touring park. Here's how to work out which one actually suits your site.

What Instant Book and Request to Book Actually Mean

Instant book is exactly what it says. A guest picks their dates and pitch, pays or leaves a deposit, and the booking is confirmed there and then, no human involved. Request to book puts a pause in that process. The guest submits their dates, you get a notification, and the booking only becomes real once you've clicked accept, usually within a set window like 24 or 48 hours.

Most modern campsite booking software lets you set this per pitch type, or even per booking channel, so you're not locked into one approach across the whole site. That flexibility matters more than it first appears, because the right setting often depends on who's asking and what they're asking for, not just your general preference.

Why Some Campsite Owners Swear by Instant Book

For a lot of sites, especially ones competing hard for direct bookings, instant book is the obvious choice. Campers have got used to booking a hotel room or a flight in thirty seconds, and a request that sits unanswered for a day feels old fashioned by comparison. If a guest is comparing you against three other sites in the same area, the one that confirms instantly often wins, simply because uncertainty makes people click away and try somewhere else.

The trade off is control. Once a booking is instant, it's instant, warts and all. If a guest books a pitch that isn't actually suitable for their setup, or a large group books when your site is really better suited to quiet couples, you find out after the fact rather than before.

Why Others Prefer to Approve Every Booking

Plenty of well run sites, particularly smaller ones, stick with request to book on purpose, not because they haven't got round to switching. If you're a CL or CS site with just a handful of pitches, every booking matters more, and a bad fit is harder to absorb than it would be on a sixty pitch park with plenty of space to work around a problem.

The cost, of course, is speed. Every hour a request sits unanswered is an hour a guest might be looking elsewhere, and on a busy weekend that delay can genuinely cost you the booking.

CL and CS Sites: Does the Five Van Rule Change the Answer

For CL sites capped at five units and CS sites capped at five as well, every single pitch carries more weight than it would on a bigger park. Losing one booking to a slow response isn't a rounding error, it's a fifth of your capacity for that night. That's a real argument for instant book, even on the smallest sites.

At the same time, small sites often have quirks that are hard to communicate through a booking form alone, a tricky turning circle, limited hookup capacity, or ground that only copes with certain vehicle types. That's the argument for keeping a human in the loop. There isn't a single right answer here. What tends to work well is instant book for guests who match your usual profile, with request to book reserved for anything unusual, like oversized vehicles, large groups, or bookings that fall outside your normal stay length.

A Middle Ground: Instant Book With Guardrails

You don't have to choose one setting and live with it forever. Most sites that get this right use instant book as the default, with rules that automatically catch the bookings worth a second look.

This hybrid approach gets you most of the speed benefit of instant book while keeping the one or two situations a season where you genuinely want to say no before saying yes.

How to Decide What's Right for Your Site

If you're still not sure, a few honest questions usually settle it.

There's no prize for picking whichever setting sounds more modern. The right choice is the one that matches how your site actually runs, not how someone else's does.

Making the Switch Without Losing Bookings

If you decide to move from request to book to instant book, do it gradually rather than flipping every pitch overnight. Start with your most predictable pitch types, the ones where a bad fit is genuinely rare, and watch how it goes for a few weeks before opening it up more widely. Keep an eye on your check in process during that period too, since it's the easiest place to spot a booking that shouldn't have gone through automatically.

If you're moving the other way, from instant book to request to book, be upfront with guests about your response time on your booking page. A guest who knows you typically reply within a few hours is far more patient than one left guessing, and that small bit of clarity does a lot to stop them booking elsewhere while they wait.

The Bottom Line

Instant book and request to book aren't really competing philosophies, they're tools for different jobs. Bigger, busier sites usually lean toward instant book because speed and volume matter more than individual vetting. Smaller sites, and CL and CS sites in particular, often do better with a human check, at least for anything outside the ordinary. The best setup for most UK campsites sits somewhere in between, instant by default, with a handful of sensible rules that catch the bookings actually worth a second look.

CampSuite® lets you set instant book or request to book per pitch type, so you're never stuck picking one approach for a site that genuinely needs both. Sign up for CampSuite's free plan and set your booking rules up in about 15 minutes, free for CL and CS sites, no card required.