Connecting Pitchup, Hipcamp & Booking.com to a System You Own
Online travel agencies bring bookings you might not have reached on your own. Pitchup, Hipcamp, Booking.com and the rest put your site in front of campers who are searching their platform rather than yours. For many campsites they are a genuinely useful source of trade. The catch is that each one runs on its own terms, with its own fees, and managing several at once can quickly become a juggling act of separate calendars.
You do not have to choose between using the agencies and owning your booking system. You can do both, with one calendar at the centre. Here is how the connection works.
The risk of running separate calendars
If each agency keeps its own diary and your website keeps another, double bookings are only a matter of time. A pitch sold on one platform has to be blocked everywhere else, instantly, or two guests turn up for the same spot. Doing that by hand across several channels is stressful and error-prone.
How channels connect: the calendar feed
The mechanism that ties it all together is the calendar feed. Each agency can publish a feed of its bookings, and your booking system reads it; in turn, your system can publish your availability back out. Connecting a channel is a matter of pointing these feeds at each other. Once linked, a booking taken on Pitchup blocks the dates in your own booking system, and a direct booking on your site blocks them on the agency.
One calendar, no double bookings
With the feeds in place, every channel reads from and writes to a single source of truth. Your real-time availability stays correct no matter where a booking came from, and the fear of two guests on one pitch goes away. You manage one diary, not five.
Keep the channels, own the core
This is the best of both worlds. The agencies keep sending you bookings, but the heart of your operation is a system you own, not a platform you rent. Your direct bookings stay commission-free, your guest data stays yours, and the agencies become one channel feeding into your calendar rather than the place your business lives.
Reduce your reliance on commission over time
Owning the core also lets you shift the balance gradually. As more guests discover they can book with you directly, the share of bookings carrying agency commission falls, while the agencies still fill the gaps. You are not turning channels off; you are putting yourself back at the centre of your own bookings.
Connect your channels to a system you own
If you want the reach of the agencies without surrendering control of your bookings, ask the Technophobia team about connecting your channels to a booking system you own.
