A plain guide to what these systems do, what tends to go wrong without one, and the questions worth asking before you hand anybody your card details. Written for parks in Ireland, with everything priced in euro.
Strip away the sales language and the job is small. A booking system holds every booking, blocks the nights a pitch is taken, and shows you who is arriving, who is on site and who is leaving. Everything else a supplier demonstrates is built on top of those three things.
It matters because a caravan and camping park takes bookings from more directions than most businesses do. Someone rings from Cork about the last weekend in July. A motorhome coming off the ferry wants two nights and a service point. A family books your glamping pods at eleven at night from a phone in the car. Put a listing site into the mix and there are four places the same pitch can be sold from, and only one of them is you.
The real value of a camping booking system in Ireland is that it turns those four into one. Sell a pitch anywhere and it vanishes from everywhere else immediately, without you having to remember to go and take it down.
A hardback diary has run plenty of parks for years, and run them well. Paper works right up until it doesn't, and it never fails on a quiet Tuesday.
It takes one enquiry written on the wrong line. On a bank holiday Saturday with a full site and a queue at the gate, there is nowhere to move anybody to and no good way to say it.
A booking held on trust, a guest who forgot all about it, and a hardstanding sitting empty on the busiest weekend of the year. Nobody chased it because nobody had a list of what was owed.
An hour after the office shuts, working out who paid what and who is arriving tomorrow. It feels like nothing. Multiply it across a season and it is weeks of your own life.
You buy it because a Friday in July should not need a notebook, a phone and a very good memory all at the same time. The test of a booking system is not the length of the feature list. It is whether the busy weekend gets easier.
Whoever you buy from, these are the parts. If one of them is missing or costs extra, you want to know now rather than in June.
Pitches and units down the side, dates across the top. One screen that answers what is free this weekend and who leaves on Sunday.
A booked pitch blocks its own dates the moment it is taken, so the same night cannot be sold twice by two different routes.
Nightly rates in euro, with different prices for the shoulder season, bank holiday weekends and the peak of August.
Deposits, balances, card payments and cash all recorded against the booking, so the balance owed is never a guess.
Confirmations, directions and arrival details sent on their own, so you are not typing the same email about the gate code forty times.
Occupancy, revenue and where the bookings came from, so next season gets planned on numbers instead of a feeling.
Pitches and accommodation down the side, dates across the top, bookings as coloured bars. Tap a bar to see who is staying and what is still owed. Tap an empty cell to add the booking you have just taken on the phone.
Touring pitches, hardstandings and pods all on the one calendar.
Ask these of us and of everyone else on your shortlist. The answers tell you more about what the next three years will feel like than a demo ever will.
There is no contract and no minimum term. You can stop at the end of any month, and your bookings and your guest records come with you when you go. The Irish price list sits on one page with no asterisks under it.
That page is the whole story on cost. The free plan, the Put it on me plan, channel management at €12 a month and a custom domain at €6 a month. If a charge is not on that page, we do not make it. The website builder, the site map designer, the WordPress plugin, the developer API and unlimited staff logins are in every plan, the free one included. There is a wizard for pitches, rates and seasons, and if you would rather not face it alone, we will sit on a call and go through it with you.
Your data is yours. Guest details, bookings and payment records can be exported in full, at any time, without asking anybody's permission first. Ask this of every supplier you talk to, because the answers vary more than you would expect.
In the quiet months the free plan costs nothing at all. It is €0 a month for up to 100 pitches, and it is the full product rather than a trial that runs out. A park that shuts from November to March pays nothing across the winter, and next season's bookings still come in. What free actually means.
Then the currency question, which is the one Irish operators ask first and rightly so. You set your rates in euro. Your guests are charged in euro. Stripe pays out in euro to your Irish IBAN, with your account set up as an Irish business. Nothing anywhere is converted from sterling, and a paid plan is billed in euro too, so there is no exchange rate sitting quietly between you and your own takings. More on how getting paid works.
On the free plan the guest pays a flat €1.75 when they book online. One night or fourteen, one pitch or three, it is the same €1.75. You keep every cent of your own pitch price.
Booking confirmation
Bookings you take yourself never carry it. The phone call, the email, the walk-in at the gate, the regular from Wicklow who texts you every February: those are yours, and nothing is charged on them.
If you would rather your guests never saw a fee at all, Put it on me is €2.75 per unit per month, capped at €137.50 a month, which is 50 units. Card processing is Stripe's own rate, paid to Stripe, and CampSuite adds nothing on top of it. Your park's own VAT position is unchanged and stays yours.
You can run CampSuite purely as a diary and never switch online booking on. It stays off until you say otherwise. When you decide the time is right, guests check live availability, pick their pitch and pay in euro from their phone, on your own website or from a link you send them. Your rules, your prices, your money.
See how online booking works →It records every booking, blocks the nights each pitch is taken, and shows you your arrivals, who is on site and who is leaving. The better ones also take payment, message the guest and give you honest numbers at the end of the season. CampSuite does all of that in one diary you can open on your phone from anywhere on the park.
No. You can use CampSuite purely as a diary, take bookings on the phone and take cash on arrival. Nothing is charged on a booking you take yourself, however it reaches you. Online booking sits there switched off until the day you want it.
On the free plan, nothing. It is €0 a month for up to 100 pitches and the €1.75 fee only appears when a guest books online. If people are booking next season over the winter, that fee is the only charge, and the guest pays it, not you.
Euro, throughout. You set your rates in euro, guests are charged in euro and payouts land in an Irish IBAN in euro. A paid plan is billed in euro as well. Your own VAT position is unchanged and stays a matter for you and your accountant.
You do. You can export the whole lot at any point, and leaving does not put your own records behind a paywall. It is worth putting this question to every supplier you shortlist, in writing, before anything is signed.
It does not have to be. Pitches, forward bookings and guest records can come across, and the sensible time to do it is the shoulder season or over the winter, so no busy weekend is exposed. We do the move with you rather than emailing you a template and wishing you luck.
Set your pitches up, take a booking and see whether it suits the way your park actually runs. Free for up to 100 pitches, and no contract to sign. If you would rather be shown around first, ring +44 1228 581035 or email hello@campsuite.net.
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