The Real Cost of OTA Commission: Why Holiday Parks Are Taking Back Control of Direct Bookings
Quick answer:
Online booking agents typically take 15–20% commission on every booking they send a holiday park, which means a park selling £400,000 of pitches and lodges a year through OTAs is quietly handing over £60,000–£80,000 annually — often more than the cost of running a dedicated holiday park booking software platform for a decade. The fix isn't abandoning OTAs overnight; it's using direct-booking tools, a visible commission calculator, and guest data ownership to shift the balance back toward bookings you control.
In 1996, a hotel in Boston made a decision that looked reckless at the time. It stopped fighting the new online travel and booking agents on price and started fighting them on relationship. Instead of matching every discount, it built a guest recognition programme so good that people booked direct just to be remembered. It took years. But eventually, more than half its rooms were filled without paying a penny in commission. The lesson wasn't "OTAs are the enemy." The lesson was that commission is a tax on not having a relationship — and taxes only get paid by the businesses that haven't built one.
Holiday parks in the UK are living a smaller, slower version of that same story. Somewhere between the caravan park down the road and the boutique hotel chain, family-run parks quietly became dependent on third-party platforms to fill pitches, lodges, and glamping pods. It happened for good reasons — OTAs bring visibility a small marketing budget can't buy. But dependency has a price tag, and most park owners have never actually seen the number written down.
What OTA commission really costs a holiday park
Run the maths honestly. A typical UK holiday park distributing through major booking platforms pays somewhere between 15% and 20% commission per booking. On a £250 weekend stay, that's £37.50–£50 gone before a single location is cleaned or bin is emptied. Multiply that across a season of hundreds of bookings and the figure stops being an abstract percentage and starts being a full-time member of staff you're not employing, or a refurbishment you're not funding.
This is precisely why a commission calculator has become one of the most-used tools on holiday park management software platforms. When an owner types in their average booking value and annual volume, the number it produces is usually larger than they expected — and larger than the monthly cost of running proper holiday park booking software with direct booking built in. Parkcore's own positioning captures this bluntly: run your park, not their commission.
Direct bookings aren't a marketing trick — they're infrastructure
Here's where a lot of advice goes wrong. Park owners are often told to "just get more direct bookings" as if it's a switch to flip. It isn't a marketing trick; it's an infrastructure problem. You cannot out-market a booking platform with better ad copy if your own website's availability calendar is clunky, your booking form takes eleven fields to complete, and there's no way to email last year's guests before they start searching OTAs again for this year's holiday.
Direct bookings happen when three things exist together: a booking system that's as fast and trustworthy as the OTA experience, a guest database that lets you reach people before they go looking elsewhere, and pricing that rewards loyalty rather than punishing it. This is the actual argument for consolidated holiday park management software — not that it looks tidier on a laptop, but that it removes the friction that quietly pushes guests back toward the platforms taking a cut.
The guest you already have is your cheapest booking
Every returning guest who books direct instead of through an OTA is pure margin recovery. No advertising spend, no commission, no acquisition cost — just a well-timed email, a smooth rebooking link, and a system that remembers their pitch, their dog, and the fact they always ask for the same week in August. Parks that treat their existing guest list as a sales channel in its own right consistently report the fastest shift away from commission dependency, because it's dramatically cheaper to keep a happy guest than to win a stranger's attention on a platform you don't control.
Weaning off OTAs without losing visibility
None of this means cancelling OTA listings tomorrow. For many parks, especially newer ones building awareness, OTAs remain a legitimate discovery channel. The strategic move is to treat OTA bookings as a lead-generation cost rather than a permanent revenue channel — capture the guest properly on their first stay, get them into your own guest CRM with consent, and make their second booking effortlessly direct. Over two or three seasons, the commission-paid percentage of your booking mix should shrink steadily, not because you fought the OTAs, but because you gave guests a better reason to come to you first.
What to look for in a direct-booking setup
A genuinely useful direct-booking system does a few unglamorous but critical things: it shows real-time availability without double-booking risk, it takes payment securely without redirecting guests to a clunky third-party checkout, it captures guest data automatically for future marketing, and it reports commission saved so owners can see the trend line moving in the right direction. This is less about flashy features and more about removing every reason a guest might bounce back to a search engine.
The multi-park version of this problem
If one park loses tens of thousands a year to commission, a group running three or four sites is often losing the equivalent of a full salary — or more — without anyone in the business seeing the combined number, because each site's booking data sits in its own spreadsheet or its own login to a different platform. This is one of the quieter reasons multi-site operators move to a single holiday park management software platform: not just for operational tidiness, but because seeing commission bleed across every park in one report is what finally makes the case for change undeniable to a management team or investor. A number nobody can see is a number nobody fixes.
Why this conversation is happening now, not five years ago
OTA commission isn't new, so it's fair to ask why so many park owners are having this conversation now. Part of it is margin pressure — energy costs, staffing costs, and maintenance costs have all risen, so a fixed percentage that once felt tolerable now eats into a much thinner profit line. Part of it is that direct-booking technology has genuinely improved; a decade ago, building a fast, trustworthy booking flow in-house was expensive and technically difficult, whereas today it's a standard feature of affordable park management software. And part of it is generational — a newer wave of park owners and managers grew up expecting software to be transparent about cost, and a percentage-based fee that scales with success rather than effort simply doesn't sit well with them anymore.
Key takeaways
- OTA commission of 15–20% per booking adds up to tens of thousands of pounds a year for a mid-sized holiday park.
- A commission calculator turns an abstract percentage into a concrete annual figure owners can act on.
- Direct bookings depend on infrastructure — booking speed, guest data, and rebooking ease — not just marketing effort.
- Returning guests are the cheapest, highest-margin bookings a park will ever get.
- The realistic goal is shifting the booking mix over seasons, not cancelling OTA listings overnight.
Frequently asked questions
Most UK online travel agents and booking platforms charge holiday parks between 15% and 20% commission per booking, though rates vary by platform and contract volume.
Yes. The parks that succeed generally don't cut OTAs off — they build a strong direct-booking experience and guest database in parallel, and let the direct-booking share grow naturally over multiple seasons.
Using a commission calculator with real booking volume and average booking value gives an accurate annual figure in minutes, which is usually far higher than owners initially estimate.
We have one on our home page here:
Commission CalculatorParks that want to see their own commission numbers can run them through Parkcore's commission calculator, or book a short demo to see how direct bookings, guest data, and pricing work together inside one platform — no commission, no OTA middleman required.
Bio for Stephen Richards: Born in Colwyn Bay North Wales, Steve's introduction it Computers was at secondary school in 1974. That first year, Machine Code was hand written onto gridded paper and sent to Connah's Quay Technical College where is was copied to punch card and then entered into a mainframe computer. The results printed out were sent back for the following week!
Steve left School in 1976 joining the Royal Air Force to work on RADAR and communications equipment. His last 5 years involved working in an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) department on the System Management Team and also writing models for Microchips. It was a good job that he had kept up with computers which had become rather a passion by the time he started in ATE.
During that time the main Mainframe we replaced in a £3.9 million upgrade reducing the run time of the biggest ATE program from just under 2 weeks to the time it took for a finger to come off a depressed return key!
Leaving the RAF after 18 years service Steve worked for a Charity (Apex Leicester Project) before returning to electronics at Sonatest in Milton Keynes which after 3 or 4 years led to a Job at Telematica the then development arm of Trafficmaster PLC (Tm). Eventually brought in-house at Tm he worked moved into the IT Support Team with his last project moving email from a Linux Box to Microsoft Echange for the 300 users in the company each of whom typically had 5 email addresses.
In 2006 Steve left to start his own company back in North Wales, Computer Technical Solutions was an MSP and moved to become an MSSP following another of Steve's passions Cybersecurity. Officially retiring in 2025, by May 2026 that overactive mind started thinking about all of the software he had seen not just for MSSPs but also for his clients that was either extremely expensive or that didn't exist with a complete answer to the needs of the SME.
By August 2026 two significant pieces of software have been created. Netmon the Network Monitoring Software and the second release Parkcore aimed at Caravan/Lodge Holiday Parks..... And so it begins!
