We built a commission-free booking system, then connected an OTA

Most of what I have written about Keydesk over the last few months comes back to the same idea: your own guests should not cost you a percentage. The pricing page says no commission. The homepage says direct bookings. The comparison pages say it too.

So there is a reasonable question to answer now that Pitchup is live in Keydesk as a two-way API integration, and it is our first connection to an online travel agent.

Have we just spent six months arguing against commission and then wired up a channel that charges it?

I do not think so, but the answer is worth setting out properly rather than burying in a feature announcement.

Direct-first is not direct-only

The argument I have been making is not that OTAs are bad. It is narrower than that, and I have not always been careful enough in saying so.

The problem is not that a marketplace introduces you to a guest and takes a fee for it. That is a fair trade, and for a new site with no audience it is often the only route to a full season. The problem is what happens afterwards, when a site has been on a marketplace for four years, has three hundred guests who first found them there, and is still paying an introduction fee on the ones who would now happily book direct if the option were obvious and easy.

That is not a commission problem. It is a dependency problem, and the solution is not to leave the channel. It is to stop being unable to leave it.

A site that takes 60% of its bookings through a marketplace and 40% direct is in a strong position. It has reach and it has a route of its own. A site that takes 95% through a marketplace has a customer acquisition channel it does not control, cannot price against, and cannot switch off. The percentage is a symptom.

So the useful goal is not zero OTA bookings. It is knowing your split, being deliberate about it, and making the second stay easier to book direct than the first one was. Our OTA commission calculator exists to put a number on that rather than a feeling, and the guide to increasing direct bookings is about building the direct route rather than dismantling the other one.

Connecting Pitchup does not conflict with any of that. It makes the split visible in one place, which is the first thing you need in order to change it.

Why Pitchup, and why first

There were other places to start. Booking.com is bigger. Airbnb is more famous. Neither is the right first connection for the operators we build for.

Pitchup is where UK camping, touring and glamping demand actually concentrates. If you run a campsite in Devon or a touring park in the Lakes, it is very likely already part of how you fill midweek and shoulder season. It is the channel our early conversations kept mentioning, unprompted, when I asked what people were already using.

It is also a specialist. Pitchup understands pitches, hookups, stay rules and the difference between a tent, a motorhome and a pod. A general accommodation marketplace flattens all of that into a room, and the integration work becomes an exercise in pretending your inventory is something it is not. Building against a system that already models outdoor accommodation properly meant we could send real stay restrictions and real extras rather than an approximation.

The honest third reason: it was tractable. We are a small team. A well-documented API for a channel our operators already use was a better first project than a large, slow integration with a marketplace where our sites are a rounding error.

What it actually does

The integration page has the full detail, so briefly:

Keydesk publishes availability, rates, stay restrictions and supported extras out to your Pitchup listings. Pitchup sends new bookings, amendments and payment-status updates back into Keydesk, where they land in the same calendar as your direct and booking-office reservations. Supported changes made on the Keydesk side go back the other way.

The practical effect is that you stop maintaining two versions of the truth. The thing that goes wrong with a manually updated channel is not usually a dramatic failure, it is drift: you close two pitches for a repair, update your own calendar, mean to update Pitchup, and then it is Saturday. The gap between those two moments is where the double booking lives.

Existing Pitchup users can import their configuration during onboarding, which creates properties, accommodation types and rate plans as a starting point rather than making you rebuild your inventory by hand before you can take a booking. If you already run more than one site, the connection supports multiple properties and multiple Pitchup listings from one account.

It is included in the £49 subscription. There is no module fee to switch it on, and it does not change your commercial relationship with Pitchup in any way. Their commission and terms are between you and them, exactly as they were.

What it deliberately does not do

Three things worth being plain about.

It is not a channel manager. One channel is not a channel management strategy, and I would rather say that than let the word do work it has not earned. If you need Booking.com, Airbnb, Hoseasons and Sykes all connected today, Keydesk is not your product yet. Please ask us before you commit rather than assuming a first integration implies the rest. The difference between a booking system, a PMS and a channel manager is worth reading if those categories blur together.

It does not make double bookings impossible. It substantially reduces the risk, because both sides now work from the same availability rather than a spreadsheet someone updates on a Tuesday. But no integration removes the need for your usual checks over a busy changeover weekend, and I am not going to claim otherwise.

It does not handle every amendment case automatically. Amendments and payment-status updates come back against the original reservation, and supported changes are sent back out. The exact handling varies by booking type, which is a real limitation rather than a detail we are hiding. We work through your specific cases during onboarding.

What comes next

Pitchup is the first OTA connection and currently the only one. More will follow, and which ones follow is genuinely shaped by who is asking.

That is not a line. We are small enough that a handful of operators saying the same thing changes the order of work, and it has already happened more than once this year. If a particular channel is what stands between you and using Keydesk, tell us which one and why it matters commercially to your site. That is more useful to us than a feature request with no context attached, because the why usually changes what we build.

The rest of the integration roadmap is deliberately short and honest about what is connected today. It will stay that way. I would rather have a page that lists two live connections accurately than one that lists twelve with an asterisk.

For what it is worth, the thing I want most from this integration is not more Pitchup bookings. It is for an operator to be able to look at one calendar, see exactly where their business came from this season, and make a deliberate decision about next year. You cannot shift your channel mix if you cannot see it.

If you want the technical detail on what moves in each direction, it is on the Pitchup integration page. If you are weighing up what your current channel mix is costing you, the commission calculator will give you an annual figure in about two minutes.