Pitchup.com Review: What the 15% Deposit Buys, and Who You Are Really Booking With

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Pitchup.com has been selling nights under canvas since 2009 and is now the largest independent booking site for campsites, touring parks, glamping and holiday parks in Britain. Its own about page puts the network at 6,371 sites across the UK, Europe and the Americas, used by 16 million holidaymakers from 178 countries, with 63 million visits a year and a record 8,773 bookings taken in a single day. It passed £500 million of cumulative bookings in 2026, having handled 5.6 million nights away in the previous twelve months, and its partner list runs from Parkdean Resorts and Forestry England to the Chatsworth Estate and the Caravan and Motorhome Club. The company behind it is Pitchup.com Ltd, number 06636463, incorporated on 2 July 2008 under the name Wikiventure Ltd and renamed on 9 May 2014, trading from Zeeta House, 200 Upper Richmond Road, Putney.

For a camper the site costs nothing to use. There is no booking fee and no membership. Pitchup takes a 15% deposit on the card at the point of booking — "Pitchup.com will always take 15% deposit on booking, whatever the payment terms are for the site/park you have booked" — and the balance goes to the park itself, either on arrival or by automatic card collection beforehand. The 15% is not an extra: the platform’s rules for park owners forbid charging more through Pitchup than anywhere else, in terms it states plainly — "Pitchup.com does not allow you to set premium rates for Pitchup.com and/or mark up rates for Pitchup.com in any way, so campsites and holiday parks must always enforce ‘rate parity’". The practical effect is that the price on the listing is the price at the gate.

One structural point decides who you deal with when something goes wrong, so it belongs up front rather than in the small print. Pitchup is the agent, not the seller. Its terms say that on booking "you will be entering into a direct and legally binding contractual relationship with the campsite provider", and its own guidance sends customers to the park for balance payments, amendments and cancellations. Pitchup takes your deposit and passes the booking on; the pitch, the shower block and the refund argument all belong to the site.

Where your 15% actually goes

The deposit and the commission are the same money. Pitchup’s trade pages say "We take a 15% commission on the bookings we send your way" and that the commission is "included in the price that visitors pay", with the balance paid "directly to you on the due date". Its customer-facing answer is written the other way round: "No, Pitchup.com does not charge a reservation fee. The 15% deposit paid to Pitchup.com is part payment on your holiday", and "The cost of our services is borne by the campsite/holiday park". Both statements are true at once, and the parity rule below is the reason they are: because the park cannot charge you more for coming through Pitchup, the 15% comes out of the park’s takings rather than being added to yours.

On a £300 week in a touring pitch that means £45 leaves your card the moment you book and £255 is owed to the park. What happens to the £255 is the park’s decision, not Pitchup’s: some take it on arrival, some take it automatically beforehand through Payup, which charges the card on a stated date and pays the money into the site’s own Stripe account. Payup is optional for existing listings but required for new ones in countries where Stripe operates if the park wants the balance before you turn up. The payment terms sit on the ‘Policies’ tab of each listing, which is worth opening before booking rather than after.

The deposit is the part you cannot get back. Pitchup’s terms say flatly that "If you cancel your booking, the deposit is non-refundable", and its help pages repeat that the deposit is "normally non-refundable", with death or serious illness treated as an exception on evidence. There are four situations in which the platform does return it: a double booking, a listing that misrepresented the site, a price the park will not honour, and a site closed for your dates. Everything else — weather, a changed plan, a broken-down car — is the park’s cancellation policy, not Pitchup’s, and those vary listing by listing.

The parity rule, and the competition law sitting behind it

Rate parity is the most consequential thing on the trade side of this business and almost nobody writing about camping mentions it. Pitchup requires that the rates, restrictions and policies a park offers through Pitchup are the same as or better than the ones it offers on its own website and on every other booking platform. It polices this with random price comparisons, and a park that breaks it has its listing suspended. For a camper the effect is straightforward and, on the whole, welcome: ringing the site direct should not get you a cheaper night, so the comparison you do on Pitchup is a real one.

UK competition law takes a colder view of the same clause. The Competition Act 1998 (Vertical Agreements Block Exemption) Order 2022, SI 2022/516, was made on 4 May 2022, laid before Parliament on 9 May 2022, came into force on 1 June 2022 and ceases to have effect on 1 June 2028. Article 8 lists the hardcore restrictions, and article 8(2)(f) names "a wide retail parity obligation or measure that has the same effect as a wide retail parity obligation". Article 8(7) defines it as "a restriction by reference to any of the supplier’s indirect sales channels (whether online or offline, for instance online platforms or other intermediaries), which ensures that the prices or other terms and conditions at which the supplier’s goods or services are offered to end users on a sales channel are no worse than those offered by the supplier on another sales channel". A parity requirement reaching a park’s own website and rival platforms alike is the wide kind rather than the narrow kind.

Being a hardcore restriction does not make an agreement unlawful by itself. It means the agreement cannot shelter under the block exemption and has to be justified on its own merits under section 9 of the Act. The CMA’s guidance on the Order, CMA166, published on 12 July 2022, deals with parity obligations at paragraphs 8.37 to 8.48 and again at 10.48 to 10.56, and treats narrow parity clauses as capable of exemption on individual assessment while wide ones lose the safe harbour outright. Nothing here is a finding against Pitchup, and no regulator has published one. It is context a camper is entitled to have: the reason you cannot beat the price by booking direct is a contract term between the platform and the park, and it is the class of term British competition law has deliberately pushed out of its safe harbour.

Three different kinds of campsite behind one search box

Type a place name into Pitchup and the results mix legal categories that have almost nothing in common. A large touring park will hold a site licence from its district council under the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960, granted on the back of planning permission and carrying conditions the council can enforce. A small farm field may hold no licence at all, because the First Schedule to the same Act lists the cases where one is not needed.

Two of those exemptions matter to a holidaymaker. Paragraph 5 covers a certificated location: no licence is required for land "as respects which there is in force a certificate issued" by an exempted organisation, provided no more than five caravans are stationed there for human habitation. Paragraph 4 covers land occupied by an exempted organisation itself. Natural England issues the exemption certificates in England, they run for five years, and the government’s own guidance is blunt about what they do: they "allow you to use land for camping or caravanning without needing a site licence or planning permission". The Camping and Caravanning Club’s certificated sites run on exactly that basis — a maximum of five caravans or motorhomes at any one time, a maximum of ten tents unless express permission has been granted, a stay capped at 28 consecutive days, at least half an acre of land, six metres between units, and an annual visit from the club’s own site officers rather than from the council.

The third category is newer. Class BC of Part 4 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order, inserted by SI 2023/747, made on 3 July 2023 and in force from 26 July 2023, permits "the use of any land as a recreational campsite for not more than 60 days in total in any calendar year" with "not more than 50 pitches" and any moveable structure reasonably necessary. It excludes scheduled monuments, sites of special scientific interest, listed building sites, safety hazard areas and military explosives storage areas, bars touring caravans while allowing motorhomes, requires the operator to provide toilet and waste disposal facilities and to notify the council in writing each year, and needs prior approval where the land sits in Flood Zone 2 or 3. Tent-only sites have their own much older regime: section 269 of the Public Health Act 1936 lets a council license land used as a site for "moveable dwellings", a term that takes in "any tent, any van or other conveyance whether on wheels or not" and any shed or similar structure used for habitation, with a fine at level 1 on the standard scale for breach.

None of this is Pitchup’s doing, and a five-van certificated location can be a far nicer place to spend a week than a 400-pitch park. The point is that the listing pages do not tell you which regime your chosen field sits under, and the three carry different inspection regimes, different enforcement routes and different people to complain to.

What a licence buys, in metres

The reason the distinction is worth caring about is that a licensed site is measured against published standards and an exempt one is not. The Model Standards 2008 for Caravan Sites in England, issued under section 5 of the 1960 Act, are what a council writes into a licence. Every caravan must where practicable be spaced at least six metres from the next; none may stand within two metres of an internal road or communal car park, or more than 50 metres from one; two-way roads must be at least 3.7 metres wide and one-way roads at least three metres; communal footpaths at least 0.9 metres; and no caravan or site building may be more than 30 metres from a fire point.

Exempt sites are not left to their own devices, but the rules are softer and enforced by the club rather than the council. The government’s model code of conduct for exemption certificate holders asks for at least six metres between units in all circumstances, at least three metres between an awning, gazebo or pup tent and the towing vehicle, six metres between rows where caravans and tents are pitched in separate areas, emergency vehicle access to within 90 metres of any unit, a 5 mph site speed limit, and no open fires or barbecues without the responsible person’s permission. Members are asked not to camp on any one site for more than 42 consecutive days, or 60 days in any 12 consecutive months.

Set those two documents side by side and the gap is narrower than you would expect on spacing and wider than you would expect on everything else: the licensed site has a measured fire point, a measured road width and a council that can vary the licence; the exempt site has a code of conduct and an annual club visit. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is inspected by somebody with statutory powers.

6,371 listings against 4,754 English sites

The best market figures for this sector come from the trade rather than from a tourist board. Pitching the Value, the economic benefit report commissioned by the UK Caravan and Camping Alliance from Frontline Consultants and published on 7 February 2024, counted 4,754 holiday parks and campsites operating in England with 320,901 pitches between them, generating £9.2 billion of gross direct visitor spending and supporting 170,429 full-time equivalent jobs, with a further £964.4 million spent by caravan and motorhome owners on maintenance. Across the UK the same work put visitor expenditure at £12.2 billion, gross value added at £7.2 billion and employment at 226,745 full-time jobs. Campers stay 82% longer than the English tourism average — 5.1 nights a trip against 2.85 — and spend more per trip as a result.

Pitchup’s own homepage counts 2,866 listings in England when you search the country as a whole. Against 4,754 operating sites, that is roughly three in five, which is a genuinely dominant position for an independent platform and also a reminder that two in five English parks are not on it. The gap matters most at the small end, where a farmer running a five-van certificated location or a 60-day pop-up may never have listed anywhere at all. If you are searching a specific valley and coming up short, the county tourist board, the two big clubs’ own site directories and a phone call to the nearest farm are still worth an evening.

The platform’s own performance figures are unusually specific for a private company: 5.6 million nights booked in the last twelve months, 176% booking growth since 2019, more than 6,000 bookings sent to its top-selling site in one year, and a single site taking over 3,400 bookings in 2020. The Financial Times ranked it 22nd in the UK and 11th in e-commerce among long-term growth champions for 2014 to 2024.

The score it publishes, and the star ratings it does not

There is no Defaqto for a campsite and no ombudsman scheme to publish uphold rates, so the independent measures have to come from elsewhere. Pitchup itself carries a Feefo service rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 11,455 ratings over the past year, against 155,362 reviews in total, and holds a Feefo Platinum Service Award for 2025. Feefo only accepts reviews from customers it can match to a transaction — "Only customers with proof of purchase can leave a Feefo review" — which makes it a more useful number than an open review page, though it measures the booking experience and not the field you end up in.

The parks themselves can be measured, and the schemes exist: the AA runs a caravan and camping quality assessment with a pennant rating, and VisitEngland runs a holiday parks scheme now administered alongside it, with ROSE awards handed out annually to individual parks. Neither rating is displayed as a filter or a badge on a Pitchup listing, so a park that has paid for an assessment gets no visible credit for it and a camper who cares about a graded shower block has to check the assessor’s own site separately. That is a straightforward gap in an otherwise well-built search, and one the platform could close without asking parks for anything they do not already have.

If the pitch is not there when you arrive

Because the contract is with the park, the platform’s exposure is small and it says so. Its terms limit it to "direct damages actually suffered, paid, or incurred by you due to a failure to meet our obligations to you in respect of our services, up to the amount paid for your booking", under English law and the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts. On the £300 example that ceiling is the £45 deposit, because the £45 is the only money Pitchup ever held.

The protections a package holiday carries are absent, and Pitchup says as much rather than leaving you to find out. A pitch booked on its own is a single travel service, so there is no organiser liability, no insolvency bonding and no ATOL certificate, and no ombudsman or approved alternative dispute resolution scheme covers a campsite booking. What is left is a claim against the park in the county court, a card chargeback through your bank, and section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 for a credit card purchase — and section 75 only bites where the item bought costs more than £100, which a 15% deposit on a mid-priced week does not reach on its own.

For the site itself rather than the booking, the route is the district council. A licensed park’s licence conditions are enforced by the council that granted them, and its environmental health team handles sanitation, water and fire point complaints. An exempt certificated location is answerable to the club that issued the certificate, and in England ultimately to Natural England, which can decline to renew an exemption certificate at the end of its five years.

Four numbers that do not quite agree

Pitchup publishes its scale in several places and the figures have drifted apart. The about page says 6,371 sites; the join page says "over 6,000 accommodation options"; the media page says 5,344 "campsites, glamping sites and holiday parks throughout the UK, Europe and the Americas"; and the 2026 announcement of the £500 million milestone gave 5,648 locations across 67 countries. Only one of those carries a date. Traffic is presented in two units that cannot be compared — 38 million annual visitors in the press release, 63 million annual visits and up to 570,000 visits a day on the trade pages — which is not a contradiction, since a visit and a visitor are different things, but nothing on the site says which is which.

The media page is the weaker one. Its market statistics are still the 2019 set: 13.1 million camping and caravanning holiday trips by UK residents, £2.2 billion of spending, 55 million bed nights, an average trip of 4.2 nights and £168 a head. Those were good numbers in 2020 and they are seven years old now, and the UKCCA work above has superseded them. A page of glamping growth statistics from 2011 and a booking lead-time figure from 2012 sit on the same page.

A coronavirus refund page is also still live, still explaining that bookings made before 1 March 2022 can have their deposit refunded against a future stay booked within three months of the original arrival date, and that after that date "the standard cancellation policy will apply". It has been dead letter for four years. None of this costs a camper money, but a site that keeps 2011 statistics and a 2022 pandemic policy on public pages invites the question of what else has not been read recently.

A new holding company, and no published turnover

The ownership changed shape in the summer of 2025 and the filings are worth reading before assuming a sale. Plan A Holdings Limited, company 16594354, was incorporated on 21 July 2025 with the SIC code for activities of other holding companies, at the same Putney address as Pitchup itself. Seven days later, on 28 July 2025, it was notified to Companies House as a person with significant control of Pitchup.com Ltd holding 75% or more of the shares and 75% or more of the voting rights, with the right to appoint and remove directors; Daniel Yates ceased to be a person with significant control in his own name on the same day, having held that position since 6 April 2016. Yates is the director of the new holding company, appointed on the day it was formed. On the face of the register this is a group reorganisation rather than a change of hands, though the holding company’s own control page could not be read on the day this was checked and anyone relying on the point should confirm it at Companies House.

What the register does not carry is any measure of the business. Pitchup.com Ltd files under the small-company regime — its accounts to 31 March 2025 were filed on 8 September 2025 as total exemption full accounts, with the next set covering the year to 31 March 2026 due by 31 December 2026 — so there is no audited turnover, no profit figure and no commission income on the public record. Every scale figure in this review is the company’s own marketing statement, correctly attributed and impossible to verify independently. For a platform holding a 15% slice of £500 million of cumulative bookings, that is a large blank.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 9 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.