Parkcore Holiday Park Management Software Blog Site

Most independent park owners can tell you their occupancy rate to the decimal point, their average nightly rate, and probably the exact age of their oldest static caravan. Ask the same owner how much they paid in booking commission last year, and the answer is usually a shrug, or a number that turns out to be wrong once you actually add it up.

That's not a criticism. Commission is one of those costs that never arrives as a single, painful invoice. It's skimmed off a booking here, a few pounds off a deposit there, spread across hundreds of transactions over a season. By the time you'd need to sit down and calculate the real total, the season's over and you're already thinking about next year's marketing budget instead.

The maths nobody does on a Tuesday afternoon

Here's a simple exercise worth doing properly, once, with real numbers rather than a rough guess. Take your total annual booking revenue — everything that came in through your booking platform, OTAs included. Multiply it by your actual blended commission rate, which for most independent parks using a mix of a booking engine and one or two OTAs typically sits somewhere between 10% and 18%.

For a park doing £350,000 a year in booking revenue at a fairly typical blended rate, that number lands somewhere around £42,000. Not a typo. Forty-two thousand pounds, gone before it ever reaches your bank account, in exchange for a booking that a guest could, in many cases, have made directly.

That figure isn't a scare tactic — it's just what the arithmetic says once you stop letting the cost hide in small increments. And it compounds. A park growing its revenue by 10% a year is also growing its commission bill by 10% a year, at exactly the moment that money would be most useful reinvested in the park itself.

Why family-run parks feel this more than they realise

Larger groups with dedicated revenue managers often negotiate down their OTA rates, or have the internal marketing muscle to push direct bookings hard enough to dilute the blended commission. A family-run park with three or four people wearing every hat in the business rarely has the time to run that kind of ongoing negotiation, and often ends up more OTA-dependent as a result — not through any failing, just because there are only so many hours in a day and somebody still has to clean the pitches.

That dependency becomes self-reinforcing. The more bookings flow through OTAs, the less time there is to build the kind of direct-booking presence that would reduce OTA dependency in the first place. It's a genuinely difficult cycle to break from inside a busy season, which is exactly why it tends to persist for years at parks that would, on paper, be perfectly capable of taking most of their bookings direct.

What a flat fee actually changes

The alternative isn't complicated, even if switching systems can feel like it. Instead of paying a percentage of every booking, a flat monthly subscription means the cost of taking a booking is the same whether it's your first of the season or your five-hundredth. ParkCore's pricing is a single £499 a month per park, with every module included — bookings, owners, EPOS, guest CRM, reporting — and no commission on anything taken through the system.

Run the same £350,000-a-year park through that model instead of a blended commission rate, and the annual software cost comes to £5,988 — everything included, no per-user charges, no tier upgrades to unlock features you're already using. Compared to the £42,000 commission example above, that's over £36,000 staying in the business every year, which for most family-run parks is the difference between deferring a maintenance project and actually doing it.

OTAs don't have to disappear overnight

None of this means abandoning Booking.com or Pitchup on day one. A sensible transition keeps OTA listings live for visibility while actively growing the direct channel underneath them — and being able to see, clearly, exactly what each channel is costing you is the first step toward shifting that balance deliberately rather than by accident. A booking system that tracks source alongside every reservation means you can watch that shift happen in your own reporting, month by month, rather than guessing at it.

Doing the sum for your own park

The numbers above are illustrative, not universal — every park's blended rate and revenue mix is different. But the exercise itself is worth five minutes with your own figures: total booking revenue for the last 12 months, multiplied by your actual blended commission rate. Whatever number comes out the other end is money currently leaving your park for every booking it takes, rather than being available to reinvest in it.

It's rarely a comfortable number to look at directly. It's also, in almost every case, the single clearest argument for why the cost of switching booking systems is worth weighing against the cost of not switching — because for most independent parks, the second number turns out to be considerably larger than the first.

Why the calculation gets avoided

It's worth being honest about why so few park owners run this sum in the first place, because the reasons are entirely understandable. Commission is deducted automatically, booking by booking, so there's never a moment where a specific invoice demands attention. A subscription fee, by contrast, arrives as one visible number every month — which paradoxically makes it feel like the bigger cost, even when the maths says the opposite.

There's also a natural reluctance to disturb something that's currently working. A booking platform that reliably takes bookings, however much commission it costs, feels like a known quantity. The fear isn't really about the money — it's about the risk of switching to something unproven during a season that can't afford disruption. That's a legitimate concern, and worth addressing directly rather than dismissing, which is exactly why any serious alternative needs a genuinely low-risk way to prove itself before asking for a long-term commitment.

What a fair trial actually looks like

A rolling contract with a short notice period changes the shape of this decision considerably. Rather than committing to a multi-year agreement based on a demo and a sales conversation, a park can migrate, run a full season, and judge the real numbers against their own bookings — with the ability to walk away if it doesn't work out, rather than being locked into a decision made before the first guest ever checked in.

That's a meaningfully different proposition to the leap of faith commission-based platforms sometimes ask for, and it's worth treating the length and flexibility of any contract as part of the actual cost comparison, not just the headline fee.