Campsite & Touring Park
Booking Management System

Hi, I’m Leon, founder and sole developer of Gatekeeper Bookings.

In 2011, I took a break from a web development career to manage a growing campsite for a season. With no proper booking system controlling availability, I improvised paper and contact-form solutions to manage bookings and arrivals — but it quickly became apparent that a purpose-built system would be a game-changer.

So in 2012 I started building Gatekeeper, going live at the original campsite in early 2013.

For the next ten years I stepped away from being physically present on the campsite, but continued managing the campsite’s online presence, bookings, and customer correspondence myself, while continuing to sit on the campsite's executive team.

That hands-on experience was instrumental in the evolution of Gatekeeper, as many improvements came directly from the day-to-day tasks I was handling.

Regular communication with campers through email helped shape the customer-facing parts of the system, while working with campsite owners, staff, and bookkeepers drove continuous improvements to the administration system.

Gatekeeper has now been managing campsite bookings for more than a decade, with the original campsite still proudly powered by Gatekeeper, along with a small number of others.

If you’d like to see whether Gatekeeper could work for your campsite, I’d be very happy to talk it through.

Gatekeeper pricing is simple: 2.5% of your total booking revenue, with no per-unit charges or other standing fees.

Importantly, this fee also includes the payment processing costs for transactions made through the online booking service, which are handled directly through Gatekeeper’s fully integrated payment gateway.

The only additional cost is the standard merchant bank charge on payments received. We recommend a suitable merchant bank where this is limited to 1% of the revenue passing through the account.

There are no other charges connected with any aspect of employing the Gatekeeper system. Ongoing advice and support on working with the system is unlimited and free, as is input on optimizing your online presence.

We do offer further related paid services to Gatekeeper clients, however, at very friendly rates. These include: park website creation (select scenarios only), park website hosting/administration, vector-based park map production, customer correspondence solutions, the running of online advertising campaigns through Google and social media providers.

Gatekeeper gives campsite owners full control, clarity, and flexibility — without adding undue complexity to day-to-day operations — combining a highly intuitive user experience with extensive insights to support effective pricing, availability, and online presence strategies going forward.

Above and beyond the support you might typically receive from other system providers, we work with you every step of the way — from the initial setup through to ongoing use.

From the outset, everything is configured in collaboration with you. Booking categories, availability rules, minimum stays, pricing structures,and payment policies are all tailored to match how your site operates.

Once live, you can always rely on us to make changes for you. However, in many aspects, including availability updates, you also have access to intuitive interfaces that allow you to make those changes quickly and confidently yourself.

The platform provides flexible handling of cancellations and no-shows, enabling you to strike the right balance between customer goodwill and business protection. An integrated credit system offers an alternative to refunds, helping you retain revenue while still accommodating customer needs.

Gatekeeper also handles the legal and administrative framework around bookings and payments, including terms, conditions, and disclaimers. This extends to marketing consent and communications, allowing you to send targeted HTML emails — whether promotional or informational (i.e. over a road closure on a particular date) — within a compliant structure.

Operationally, built on over a decade of experience, the system is designed for intuitive efficiency. Staff can manage bookings, check in guests, and monitor arrivals from desktop or mobile devices, with tiered, per-user accounts ensuring sensitive information remains protected. Across the system, everything is highly interconnected, making it easy to understand and move between customer and group profiles, site occupancy, and more — without the need to navigate complex menus.

Financial oversight is comprehensive. Detailed reporting supports both internal management and external accountants, while real-time visibility of bookings, payments, and invoices to ensure nothing is missed.

Payment processing in association with the booking service can be monitored directly, giving you clear insight into failed or incomplete transactions — often providing a more accurate picture of failed transactions than the account reported by the customer.

Gatekeeper also provides integrated analytics. Track where visitors arrive from and how they interact with the booking service — a uniquely powerful and informative tool in terms of understanding your online presence, in guaging the effectiveness of your presence on Google, search and social media advertising campaigns, and subscription strategies in relation to OTA/directory placements.

Depending on your setup, this reporting can also extend to your park’s main website, integrating and combining landing and event data to provide a complete picture of referrals across your online services.

Combined with extensive statistical reporting — with a range of year-on-year comparisons — Gatekeeper provides considerable advantages where informed decision-making can be based on clear, reliable data.

Additional features such as discount management, a wide range of group booking administration controls, invoicing options, and customer management tools (including no-rebook lists) provide the flexibility to handle every real-world scenario.

There is no need to worry about ownership and safety of your data either, where we send you by email an encrypted backup copy of your entire database daily (encrypted with a password you hold yourselves). Your main bookings, payment transactions, invoices, outstanding credits, and other compatible information can then be readily imported into competitor systems (where they are willing) from this backup, should you so wish.

So what does gatekeeper not have that a campsite owner might want to have... realistically only that we don't "integrate" with every OTA (online travel agency) out there, as some competitor systems do. Partly because, we feel using OTAs to take bookings is not always the wisest option. We do however offer an integration with campsites.co.uk.

Of course, please don't hesitate to get in touch to discuss your requirements in more detail, and rest assured that in the unlikely event a particular functionality or option you require does not yet exist in Gatekeeper, we will be more than happy to build your needs in.