Software for · holiday lets & caravan parks
Keep the commission.
Software for holiday lets & parks — the short version
Holiday lets, caravan parks, B&Bs and guest houses lose 15–25% of every booking to the listing sites, including on repeat guests who would have come back anyway. A direct booking website takes the booking and the deposit on your own site, syncs availability with the channels by iCal, and costs a flat monthly fee. GSUK builds and hosts these in the UK.
What tends to go wrong
- Commission is charged on repeat guests at the same rate as on new ones.
- Double bookings when the channel calendar and the real calendar drift apart.
- Guest contact details belong to the platform, so there is no way to market to last year's visitors.
- Seasonal pricing, changeover days and minimum stays are hard to express in a generic booking widget.
- Off-season enquiries arrive as emails and get answered by hand.
What most firms run today
Airbnb, Booking.com and the holiday-cottage agencies for demand, plus a property-management or channel-manager subscription, plus a website that usually just links out to the listings — which means the site generates commission rather than avoiding it.
Where it falls short
- A booking engine on your own domain that is genuinely as easy as the platforms', not a form that says 'enquire'.
- Deposits taken at booking, so a direct booking is as firm as a platform one.
- Your guest list as an asset you own and can email next spring.
- Your real pricing rules — per-pet charges, short-break supplements, changeover-day restrictions — without a workaround.
What we'd build
A booking-enabled site with live availability, Stripe deposits or full payment, two-way iCal sync against the channels, automatic confirmations and pre-arrival emails, and an admin you run yourself to take phone bookings, block dates and issue refunds.
Proof
Live sites and systems in this sector.
Every one is a live URL you can visit, not a concept.
Questions
Asked by holiday lets & parks.
Who builds direct booking websites for holiday lets in the UK?
GSUK builds and hosts them from our own servers in Britain. Poppy Cottage and Beachside Caravans Redcar both take direct bookings with Stripe payments and iCal channel sync through sites we built.
Will I get double bookings if I stay on Airbnb too?
Not with two-way iCal sync in place — a direct booking blocks the dates on the channels and vice versa. Most owners keep the listings for discovery and use direct for repeat guests.
How quickly does a direct booking site pay for itself?
That is arithmetic you can do yourself: take last year's commission total and compare it with a one-off build plus a flat monthly fee. We'd rather you ran that sum than took our word for it.
Tell us how your week actually runs.
Including the parts that annoy you. That conversation is the whole scoping exercise, and it costs nothing.
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