Why Your Campsite Needs Its Own Website — and What It Should Cost

Many Swiss campsites get 60–80 % of bookings through OTAs — Booking.com, Camping.info, the big portals. On the surface it is convenient: the OTA brings the guests, no marketing required.

In reality it is a structural risk. Three reasons:

Margin. 15 % OTA commission sounds moderate until you compare it to EBIT. Many campsites have operating margins below 20 %. A 15 %-commission booking wipes out most of the margin on that revenue.

Control. The OTA decides how you rank, which add-ons display, which reviews are prominent. An algorithm update can drop your ranking overnight — and there is little you can do.

Relationship. After an OTA booking, you barely know the guest. Email goes via the OTA, reviews land on their platform, loyalty belongs to them.

The answer is not a better OTA strategy — it is an own website that drives direct bookings and keeps the relationship. "We already have a website," many operators say. But most campsite sites were built between 2014 and 2018: no mobile design, no embedded booking widget, no multilingual support. They are digital business cards, not sales instruments.

An effective campsite website must do four things:

A professional campsite website from a competent Swiss agency typically runs CHF 15,000–40,000 for the initial build, plus CHF 1,500–4,000 per year for hosting, maintenance, and content updates. That is not fantasy — it is the market. Agencies that promise a website for CHF 3,000 either ship a template without consulting or bill the hidden maintenance hours over the years.

Those numbers scare many operators off — rightly, when the website is a separate investment alongside expensive campsite software.

CampOne made the explicit decision not to sell the website as an add-on but as part of the base package. Every plan — Starter at CHF 180/month through Enterprise — includes a fully custom-designed, hosted website.

"Custom-designed" means exactly that: our team builds the site for your place. No templates, no builders. Your photos, your structure, your brand voice — with the embedded booking widget wired directly into your CampOne back-office.

That works economically because the site runs on our platform (no per-customer hosting cost), the design framework allows individual output without rebuilding from scratch every time, and we treat the website as differentiation rather than a profit lever.

What happens when you cancel CampOne? Short version: the hosted website ends with the subscription because we hold the rights to the design. Your data — customers, bookings, invoices — exports in a standard format, so nothing is lost. But the design is part of the CampOne service, not transferable.

That is a trade-off we communicate openly. In return you get a website that would otherwise be a five-figure investment plus ongoing maintenance.

Without a modern own website, a campsite stays OTA-dependent — structurally, financially, and in its customer relationships. The website is no longer optional.

The question is how you get one: either as a separate five-figure investment with ongoing maintenance, or integrated into the software package. CampOne deliberately chose the second path — because it is economically sustainable and keeps the customer relationship coherent from day one.