Campsites.co.uk Review: The Deposit the Park Sets, and the Price Promise Behind It

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Campsites.co.uk lists more than 3,200 camping, glamping and touring sites across the UK, charges campers no booking fee of any kind, and takes a deposit starting at 15% of the stay with a £5 minimum. It has been running since 2003, added instant online booking in 2019, and says more than 475,000 campers now use it to find and hold a pitch. Figures checked on 17 October 2026 against the company’s own pages, booking terms and filings.

For a camper the economics are unusually plain. The booking terms state it outright: "We do not charge you any booking fees or add any fees to the prices quoted by the Park for your Booking." What you see on a listing is the park’s own price, with VAT included where it applies, because the money comes from the other side of the transaction — 10% plus VAT on each booking the site sends a park, with ordinary directory listings free and, in the company’s own words to owners, "No setup fees, contract, or exclusivity". There is nothing to join and nothing to cancel.

One structural point decides whose number you ring when a holiday goes wrong, so it belongs here rather than in the small print. The booking terms say "For all Bookings made or taken on your behalf through the Website, your contract is with the Park directly", and that the company "acts as an agent only in facilitating Bookings". Deposits, balance dates, cancellation windows and refunds are in practice each park’s own rules rather than one house policy applied to all 3,200 of them. That is a deliberate design choice, and understanding it is worth more than any other single fact on this page.

Where the 15% goes, and the £5 underneath it

The home page carries a heading marked Price promise and a single line beneath it: "Always get the best rate, with deposits from just 15% and no booking fees." The about page puts the same thing as "low deposits and no booking fees". Both are accurate, and both describe a floor rather than a rate. The binding version is in the booking terms, which say "Payments will be collected according to the terms set by Parks and comprise a deposit amount" and then add the only hard figure the company sets itself: "Deposit payments are subject to a £5 minimum and are non-refundable."

So two different people decide what you pay up front. The park decides the percentage, which can sit anywhere at or above 15%, and the platform imposes a £5 floor underneath it. On a £400 week that works out as £60 now and £340 later. On a single £30 night the floor is what bites, because 15% of £30 is £4.50 and the minimum takes £5. Neither the listing pages nor the terms publish a ceiling, which means the up-front cost of a specific booking is not knowable until the checkout page shows it.

The balance is handled the same way, by reference to somebody else’s rules. "If the Park’s terms for your Booking dictate that a Balance Payment should be collected automatically when it becomes due", the company says, "we will instruct the Payment Provider to process that charge using the same card as used to make the Deposit." If that payment fails, "the Park will contact you", and "[t]he Park may cancel your Booking if they have not received your Balance Payment by the due date". The deposit being non-refundable is not sharp practice, incidentally: regulation 28(1)(h) of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 lifts the ordinary 14-day online cancellation right off accommodation booked for a named date, so every campsite, hotel and hostel in the country is in the same position.

The price promise, and who has to do the noticing

This is the clause worth reading twice, because it is the mechanism behind the headline claim and it is published in full. "Parks commit to matching their best rates in the prices quoted on our Website, but if you do notice any lower prices elsewhere please contact us using the details on our Contact Us page prior to your Booking and we will ask the Park to price match for you."

Read that slowly and three things fall out of it. The commitment is the park’s, not the platform’s. The trigger is the camper spotting a cheaper price somewhere else. And the remedy is that the company will ask — the sentence promises a request, not a reduction. The timing matters as well: the words are "prior to your Booking", so once the deposit has gone through there is no stated route back to a lower price at all.

What sits behind the clause is just as telling. The owner-facing pages promise "No setup fees, contract, or exclusivity" and say "[a]s a bookable listing, we won’t tie you into any sort of minimum allocation or minimum term". A park signs nothing, commits nothing and can walk away whenever it likes, which is a genuinely attractive offer to a small operator and also means there is no contractual parity obligation anywhere in the arrangement. Nothing can be suspended, because nothing has been agreed. The about page’s "you’ll never pay more than booking direct" therefore rests on the park’s own pricing discipline and on readers reporting exceptions.

There is a respectable argument that this is the better design. Wide retail parity obligations — the kind that forbid a hotel or a park from undercutting a platform anywhere else — are exactly what competition authorities across Europe have spent a decade objecting to. A platform that asks rather than compels avoids that problem entirely. It also, unavoidably, gives the reader a weaker promise.

10% plus VAT, and the arithmetic behind the claim

The owner pages are blunter about money than the camper pages, and they are where the business model is legible. A bookable listing runs "at a commission rate of just 10% + VAT", a basic listing is "FREE", the model is "[p]ay as you go, on results", and parks are told they will "pay 20% less commission than the industry norm". The FAQ repeats it and names a competitor: "Our online bookings service is 20% cheaper than Pitchup."

That claim is worth checking rather than repeating, and it survives the check. Add VAT at 20% to a 10% commission and a park hands over 12% of the booking value. Pitchup’s own supplier pages state that for UK businesses "the commission (‘deposit’) we deduct from bookings includes 20% VAT", which puts its published 15% at 12.5% before tax. Twelve against fifteen is a fifth lower. Ten against twelve and a half is also exactly a fifth lower. The saving is 20% whether a park compares the two figures gross or net, which is unusually honest for a marketing percentage — on a £400 booking it is £48 including VAT against £60, a difference of £12.

The other side of the model is that the two percentages do not match each other. The camper’s deposit starts at 15% of the stay and the park’s commission is 12% of it including tax, and the booking terms say nothing about how the gap is reconciled or when a park receives its share of money the platform’s payment provider has already taken. That is normal for an agency arrangement and it is still unpublished. Parks are also told that becoming bookable will "typically get 75% more interest" and that even a free listing will "typically get thousands of pounds worth of booking enquiries from us each year", neither of which carries a date or a sample size.

If the park cannot honour the booking

The liability position is set out clearly, and it is narrow. "Subject to the limitations set out in these Terms and to the extent permitted by law", the company says, it "shall only be liable for direct damages actually suffered, paid or incurred by you due to an attributable shortcoming of our obligations in respect to our services, up to an aggregate amount of the aggregate cost of your Deposit and Balance Payment (where collection is initiated by us)". Indirect, consequential, special and incidental losses are excluded, and nothing in the terms limits liability "for death or personal injury resulting from its negligence; nor for the Company’s fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation".

Then comes the clause that matters most to anybody arriving at a full site. "We are not liable for any refunds in the event of changes to your booking (made by you or the Park), overbooking by the Park, Force Majeure (defined below) or any other cause beyond our control." A separate sentence disposes of the obvious follow-up question: "The Park are not liable for refunds or expenses you incur in the event they are prevented from fulfilling your Booking". Set those two beside "Deposits paid to confirm Bookings are non-refundable and cancellations are subject to the terms of each Park", and a park that overbooks, closes or simply cannot accommodate you leaves the deposit where it is, with no exception written anywhere for closure.

Nor is there an escalation route built in. The company "acts as an agent only in facilitating Bookings, but will provide support as a third party on a reasonable efforts basis", and it says in terms that "[a]lthough we are not obliged to mediate between you and the Park in the event of any complaint or dispute, we will make reasonable efforts to assist you and the Park in reaching a resolution wherever we can". A pitch booking sits outside financial regulation entirely, so no ombudsman stands behind it and no approved alternative dispute resolution body has jurisdiction. What is left is the park itself, a chargeback through your card issuer, section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 on a credit card purchase over £100, and the county court. The Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018 do not help either, because a pitch on its own is a single travel service and carries no insolvency protection — true of every accommodation platform rather than of this one in particular.

Reviews only exist where a booking went through

The review policy is one of the better things about the site and it is stated in one sentence on the home page: "Thousands of easy-to-search reviews, all from verified guests who booked through us." The about page calls them "honest and verified guest reviews". That is a stricter rule than most campsite directories apply, and it closes off the usual complaint about user-generated ratings, because nobody who has not paid for a stay through the platform can leave one. A long-established park such as Highlands End Holiday Park shows 207 reviews on its listing.

The consequence is less often spelled out. A park on the free basic tier takes no bookings through the platform, so it can never accumulate a single review there, however good it is. The score attached to a listing is therefore partly a measure of how long that park has been paying 10% plus VAT, not only of how well it runs its showers. And because the site does not publish how many of its 3,200-odd listings are actually bookable online, a reader looking at a listing with no reviews cannot tell whether they are seeing a park nobody rates or a directory entry nobody can book.

The booking terms contain no clause about reviews at all — nothing on moderation, nothing on how a park challenges a review it believes is unfair, and nothing on when a review is removed. For a site whose main editorial asset is its reviews, that is a gap worth closing.

The ratings the listings do not carry

The site runs its own annual recognition, the Outstanding Sites list, described as "[o]ur annual list of hand-picked camping, glamping and touring sites" that "offer campers a consistently excellent experience", alongside a 2025 awards programme. The word doing the work there is hand-picked. No scoring threshold, minimum review count, assessment visit or published methodology sits behind the list, so it reads as editorial selection rather than measurement — which is a perfectly legitimate thing for a magazine-style directory to do, and a different thing from an inspection.

An inspection regime does exist for this sector and no listing shows it. VisitEngland Assessment Services runs a Holiday Parks quality scheme whose standards document is public, and it is specific. The overall star bands are 60–74% for three stars, 75–86% for four and 87% and above for five, with the rule that "[n]o section to be more than one star rating band below the overall rating" and cleanliness never allowed to fall below the overall grade at all. Four stars requires electric hook-up on half of the non-seasonal touring pitches and five stars on 70% of them. Minimum facility ratios are set per 30 pitches — at four star, one urinal, one toilet, two washbasins and one bath or shower for gents, and two toilets, two washbasins and one bath or shower for ladies. Members receive a visit every year.

A park holding four stars under that scheme gets no visible credit on a Campsites.co.uk listing, and a camper who wants an independently assessed site cannot filter for one. Two details could not be established from the public document and are worth saying rather than guessing: the standards text does not state its own version date, and it does not say whether the annual visit is announced or made as a mystery guest.

What it costs to hold a pitch elsewhere

The sharpest way to see what a park-set deposit means is to put it beside an operator that owns its sites and can therefore impose one rule across all of them. The Caravan and Motorhome Club’s own booking terms, for stays booked from 4 July 2024, say the deposit "will usually be £5 per stay" and that "the £5 is a fixed amount regardless of the price of the stay". For bookings taken between 9 June 2023 and 3 July 2024 it was 10% of the stay with a £20 minimum, so the Club moved deliberately from a percentage to a flat fee. The balance is "due the evening before arrival (if you have selected automatic balance payments)".

The cancellation position is the part a platform cannot match. "Changes and cancellations are FREE when made more than 21 full days before your scheduled arrival date", and inside that window the charge is the proportion of the deposit attributable to what you cancelled, rising to "the entire deposit" if you drop the whole booking. Fail to turn up and fail to say so by 8pm on the arrival day and it is treated as a no-show, with no refund of "any element which has been paid, including the full deposit".

Hold the two side by side on a £400 week. Through the Club, £5 is at stake and nothing at all until 21 days out. Through Campsites.co.uk, at least £60 is non-refundable from the moment the card is charged, and whether any of it comes back is a question for that particular park’s terms. None of which is a failing of the platform so much as a description of what it is: a club with 3,200 of its own pitches could publish one cancellation policy, and a directory listing 3,200 independent businesses cannot. It is simply a cost the reader should price in before choosing which door to go through.

Addactive Limited, two addresses and no published turnover

The brand is not the company. The booking terms say Campsites.co.uk is "a trading name of Addactive Limited", "[r]egistered in England No. 5891444". Companies House carries it as ADDACTIVE LIMITED, number 05891444, an active private limited company incorporated on 31 July 2006, with SIC codes 62012 for business and domestic software development, 63120 for web portals and 79909 for other reservation service activities not elsewhere classified. The first two of those describe a software house, which is a fair account of what the business actually is.

There are two addresses and it is worth knowing which is which. The registered office is "Robert J Gogarty Chartered Accountants, Bank House Southwick Square, Southwick, Brighton, West Sussex, BN42 4FN" — an accountant’s office, which is ordinary for a company of this size and is not where anybody works. The operating address on the contact page is Oakfield House, 35 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath RH16 3BW, with three separate numbers: 01444 676015 for general enquiries, 01444 676016 for existing site owners and 01444 676014 for parks thinking of joining.

Ownership has been stable and is fully disclosed. Martin Smith and Hannah Kate Smith each hold more than 25% but not more than 50% of the shares and of the voting rights, both notified on 31 July 2016 and both resident in England; Hannah Kate Smith is company secretary, her details last updated on 1 April 2026. Accounts to 31 December 2025 were filed on 24 September 2026 as total exemption full accounts, with the next set made up to 31 December 2026 and due by 30 September 2027. Micro-entity accounts were filed for the year to 31 December 2020. The practical effect is that no turnover, commission income or booking volume has ever been published, so every audience figure on the site — the 475,000 campers, the 3,200 listings, the survey of "4,000+ of our customers" in which 11% called themselves primarily glampers — is the company’s own count and none of it carries a date.

Three dates get quoted for the same business and none of them contradicts the others, which is worth saying plainly because it looks like an inconsistency and is not. The about page says "[f]ounded in 2003", the company was incorporated on 31 July 2006, and the footer reads © 2015-2026. A domain and a directory can easily predate the limited company set up to run them. The one figure that genuinely does not match itself is the site count: "more than 3,000" on the about page against "more than 3,200" on the home page, with neither dated.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 17 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.