Aires, service points and overnight stopovers, booked from a phone at the side of the road. Short stays, late arrivals and passing trade, handled without you sitting by the phone all evening. Priced in euro, free for up to 100 pitches.
Most booking systems assume a family books in March for a week in July. A van does not work like that. It decides at four in the afternoon, books from a layby, arrives at eight and is gone by ten the next morning. That is real money, it turns up when nobody planned for it, and it deserves to be easy to take.
Three things make stopover trade harder than it needs to be. All three are settings you change once.
Set a one-night minimum, your own nightly rate in euro and how close to arrival people can book, right up to the same day. The pitch then sells itself. No enquiry form, no waiting on your reply, no booking lost because you were down the far end on the mower.
The booking page is built for a small screen and a patchy signal. Pick a night, add the extras, pay. There is no account to create and no app to download, so somebody sitting in a passenger seat outside Westport can be booked in before the kettle boils.
The confirmation carries your directions, your gate code and your house rules, sent automatically the moment they pay. You go to bed. They park up quietly. In the morning you both see the same booking, and nobody had to stand at a gate in the rain.
A stopover is rarely only a pitch. Add the things people actually want and let them tick the boxes while they book.
Offer it as a paid extra on the bays that have it, priced per night, so nobody plugs in for nothing.
Fresh water, grey waste and chemical disposal, either charged as an extra or included in the night.
Add a shower, a token or a laundry slot to the booking instead of hunting for coins at the door.
Set a maximum length per bay so a nine metre van never books a space it cannot get into.
Ask the questions that matter on your ground at the point of booking, and price them if you want to.
Plenty of one-nighters stay two. Let them extend without ringing you, with the pitch blocked correctly.
This is the booking page on a phone. Dates, pitch, extras, pay. It takes a couple of minutes on a poor signal at the side of the road, which is exactly where most stopover bookings get made.
A real booking flow, from our demo site.
Your stopover gets found in a handful of places: a Failte Ireland listing, a stopover app, a Facebook group, a page on your own website, a sign at the entrance. All of them can point at the same booking link. Print it as a QR code, screw it to the gate post, and a van that rolls up at nine in the evening can book itself in and pay without knocking on your door.
See how online booking works →CampSuite™ is free for up to 100 pitches, and that is the full product rather than a trial that runs out. When somebody books online, a flat €1.75 is added to what they pay. You keep your whole pitch price.
Booking confirmation
The fee is €1.75 whatever they book. One night or five, one van or three, it does not change with the length of the stay. It is charged to the guest, not to you, and it never passes through your takings.
Bookings you take yourself are never charged. Phone, email, a van at the gate paying you at the door: none of those carry a fee. If you would rather guests never saw a fee at all, the "Put it on me" plan covers it for €2.75 per unit per month, capped at €137.50 a month, which is 50 units. Your park's own VAT position is unchanged and stays yours.
You do not need a website, a developer or a training day to start selling stopover nights.
Most motorhome trade in Ireland is moving. Vans off the ferry heading west, people working their way up the Wild Atlantic Way, a run through Ireland's Ancient East on a bank holiday weekend. They are not planning a fortnight on your park. They want one night, a level pitch, fresh water and somewhere to empty. Then they are gone before you have finished your breakfast.
That trade is easy to miss. If the only way to book is to ring you, some of them will not bother, and the rest will ring while you are cutting grass at the far end of the field. A booking link that works at ten to nine on a wet Tuesday catches nights you were never going to get. It also heads off the other version: a van in your entrance, nothing free, and a conversation neither of you wanted to have.
It cuts both ways through the year. When the shoulder season goes quiet, a stopover rate on the pitches you are not filling is money on top, without discounting the pitches you do sell. And it is euro from end to end. You type a rate in euro, the guest is charged in euro, and Stripe pays out to your Irish IBAN. Nothing is converted from sterling and no guest is shown a currency they were not expecting. See what it costs.
Stopovers do not have to be the whole business either. Plenty of parks run a few motorhome bays alongside touring pitches, hardstandings, seasonals and a couple of pods, and the lot sits in one diary on one screen. Caravan and camping parks covers that side of things.
Yes. You decide how close to arrival people can book, right up to same day if you want the traffic. If you would rather not have vans arriving after dark, set a cut-off time and the booking page stops offering tonight once you pass it. Everything else stays bookable.
Your booking page has an ordinary web address, so anything that holds a link can point at it. Print it as a QR code and put it on the gate, on a board at the service point, or on a card you hand out. A guest scans it, books the bay they are looking at, and pays on their phone.
Yes. Set it up as a paid extra on a booking, or as its own bookable item with its own rate. That way a van that only wants water and waste can pay for that without taking a pitch for the night, and you still have a record of who came through.
Add them on your phone in about twenty seconds and the pitch is blocked from that moment. Walk-ups, phone bookings and online bookings all land in the same diary, so there is one version of tonight rather than three. Anything you take yourself carries no fee.
No. You can use CampSuite as a diary first and carry on taking bookings by phone with cash at the gate. Online bookings are there the day you want them. You can even switch them on for the motorhome bays alone and leave the rest of the park as it is.
Yes. You set your rates in euro, the guest is charged in euro, and your Stripe account is set up as an Irish business paying out to your own IBAN. Card processing is Stripe's own rate, paid to Stripe, and CampSuite adds nothing on top.
An afternoon to set it up, free for up to 100 pitches, no card needed. Ring +44 1228 581035 or email hello@campsuite.net if you would rather talk it through with a human first.
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