Comparison · 8 min read
Book direct or book through a platform? What actually differs
Platforms charge owners 10–22% commission. Here is what that means for what you pay, what you get, and when booking direct genuinely is not worth it.
Almost every place on our list can be booked directly with the person who owns it. Most can also be booked through a platform. The difference is not usually the headline price — it is who carries the risk when something goes wrong, and how much of your money reaches the person who actually made the place.
What the platforms take
The commission rates are public, or close enough to it. Pitchup takes around 15% from the host. Hipcamp takes 12.5–15%. Campsites.co.uk takes 10% plus VAT. At the premium end, Canopy & Stars takes 15–22%.
That money comes out of the owner's side, not visibly out of yours. Which is why "book direct and save" is often untrue at the point of sale — the owner has usually set one price everywhere, because most platforms require rate parity. What changes is how much of it they keep.
Where direct genuinely wins
Three situations, reliably:
Small operators with real flexibility. Hinterlandes moves location periodically. Mallinson's is three treehouses run by the people who built them. If you want to ask whether the hot tub can be lit before you arrive, you want the owner, not a support queue.
Anything involving a specific pitch. Campsite booking systems abstract pitches into categories. Ring Three Cliffs Bay and you can talk about which pitch actually has the view, which is the entire reason to go there.
Last-minute changes. An owner can move your dates. A platform's cancellation policy cannot.
Where it does not
If a place only sells through one channel, use that channel — Great Langdale goes through the National Trust's own portal, and there is no direct route around it. And if you are booking six months out for a fixed week in August, the platform's payment protection is worth something real.
One thing worth saying plainly: we link to the official site first on every listing on this site, and at launch we earn nothing either way. We are not steering you direct because it pays us. It does not.
The one to watch
Check you are on the actual official site. Glen Nevis reported a phishing incident in 2026 involving mirror sites — we link only to glen-nevis.co.uk for that reason, and you should be equally careful with anything you reach through a search ad.
