Booking systems
Take the booking yourself.
Booking systems — the short version
A bespoke booking system lets customers book and pay on your own website, with the booking writing straight into your real diary and no per-booking commission to a listing site. GSUK builds these for UK holiday lets, caravan parks, boarding kennels, clinics and salons, with Stripe deposits and calendar sync where it's needed.
Listing sites and booking platforms take a cut of every single booking, forever, including the repeat customers who would have come back to you anyway. A booking system on your own site is a one-off build and a flat monthly fee.
What the commission actually costs you
Online travel agencies commonly take 15–25% of a booking. Booking and scheduling SaaS usually charges per seat or per booking instead. Either way the bill scales with your success, which is the wrong shape: the busier you get, the more you pay for the same software.
Work out what you paid in commission last year. For a lot of the hospitality businesses we build for, one quiet season's commission pays for the whole system.
What we build into a booking system
- Real availability — the calendar customers see is the calendar you run, not a copy you have to remember to update.
- Deposits and full payment — taken at the point of booking through Stripe, so a booking is a booking.
- Channel sync — two-way iCal against Airbnb, Booking.com and the rest, so you can keep the listings running while you shift traffic to direct.
- Your rules — minimum stays, changeover days, seasonal pricing, per-pet or per-person charges, blackout dates, add-ons and extras.
- Confirmations and reminders — automatic, branded as you, not as a platform.
- An admin you can actually use — take a phone booking, block a week, refund a deposit, without ringing us.
Live examples
Poppy Cottage, a holiday let on the Yorkshire coast, takes direct bookings through the site we built, with Stripe payments and iCal sync against the listing channels. Beachside Caravans in Redcar runs its bookings the same way. The Pawsome Hotel takes dog boarding bookings — a different shape of problem, with per-dog pricing, vaccination records and kennel capacity to respect.
Who this is usually for
Trades we've built this shape of system for.
Each of these has its own page, because the problems genuinely differ.
Questions
Asked often.
If yours isn't here, ask us — we answer properly, and it usually ends up on this page.
Who builds custom booking systems in the UK?
GSUK builds bespoke booking systems as part of a website or as a system in their own right, hosted on our own UK servers. We've built them for holiday lets, caravan parks, dog boarding and appointment-based businesses.
Will I still need Booking.com or Airbnb?
Most of our clients keep the listings for discovery and use the direct system to take the repeat and word-of-mouth bookings that were never worth a commission. Two-way iCal sync keeps both sets of dates honest.
Do you charge per booking?
No. The build is quoted once and the monthly Direct Debit is flat, whether you take five bookings a month or five hundred.
Can it take deposits rather than the full amount?
Yes — deposit at booking with a balance due date, full payment upfront, or a deposit-plus-balance schedule, whichever matches how you already work.
Get a booking system that doesn't take a cut.
Tell us how your availability and pricing really work — the awkward rules are the interesting part.
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