Pitch types explained

A pitch type is a kind of bookable space: "electric grass pitch", "safari tent", "shepherd hut". It holds everything guests need to book it — price, capacity, photos, when it's available — and a quantity: how many identical, interchangeable units of it you have.

That last part is the important one. Guests book a pitch type, not a numbered pitch. If your "electric grass pitch" type has 20 units, Campiamo will happily take 20 overlapping bookings for it and refuse the 21st. Which physical pitch each guest ends up on is yours to decide at check-in.

How you split your site into pitch types is the single most important modelling decision you make in Campiamo, so it is worth reading this page before you start adding them.

One type, many units

Each pitch type has a quantity — the number of units of it you have. Availability is worked out per night:

• On any given night, the type can hold as many stays as it has units. 20 units means 20 simultaneous bookings.
• A stay occupies a unit from its check-in night up to, but not including, its check-out day — the check-out day is free for a new arrival.
• For a date range, what matters is the busiest single night, not the number of bookings that touch the range. Lots of short, staggered stays can overlap a fortnight without the type ever actually being full on any one night.

Bookings are not the only thing that consumes units. A manual block (a walk-in hold, maintenance, a private event) takes units off availability for its dates in exactly the same way, and so do the blocks created by channel connections when a stay is sold on Booking.com or Airbnb. One calendar, everything counted.

Two categories

When you add a pitch type you choose one of two categories, and the choice shapes the rest of the form:

Camping and touring — tent, touring caravan and motorhome pitches. You describe the pitch: surface (grass, hardstanding or gravel), hookup (electric or non-electric), and which equipment you accept (tent, caravan, motorhome, campervan, trailer tent, roof tent). Campiamo builds the guest-facing name from these — set the field name to "Meadow", pick electric, grass and tents, and guests see "Meadow electric grass tent pitch". You don't invent a name; you describe the pitch and the name follows.

On-site accommodation — structures guests sleep in. You pick the type from a list: glamping (bell tent, safari tent, yurt, tipi, pod, dome) or cabins and lodges (cabin, lodge, shepherd hut, treehouse, cottage, static caravan). Here you must also say how many people it sleeps.

The category can be changed later, but it changes which details the form asks for, so it is easier to get it right first time.

Pricing

Every pitch type has a base price per night — the rate that applies when nothing more specific does.

On top of that:

• Seasonal rates. Define seasons for your property (High Season, Easter, whatever you like), then give each pitch type a per-night price for any season where the base price isn't right. Leave a season blank and the base price applies. Each night of a stay is priced by the season it falls in, so a stay straddling two seasons is priced night by night.
• Minimum and maximum nights. A default minimum for the pitch type, and optionally a different minimum per season. When a stay crosses seasons, the strictest minimum that applies to any night of the stay wins. A maximum stay length is optional.
• Flat rate per stay. Instead of a nightly rate, a pitch type can charge one fixed price for the whole stay — useful for packages. You can optionally say how many nights the price covers and what each extra night costs beyond that. A stay shorter than the package still pays the full package price, and flat-rate pitch types don't use seasonal rates.

You also say what the price includes — how many adults, children and dogs — and set per-night charges for extras beyond that, plus hard limits (maximum persons, maximum dogs, adults only, dogs allowed). Guests see the included amounts on the booking form, and the extra charges are added automatically when a booking exceeds them.

Charging per person

Many sites price by the head rather than by the pitch, and the same fields do it. Set the base price to the rate for one adult and say the price includes 1 adult; then give the per-night price for each extra adult and each child. A pitch at £14 a night including one adult, with £14 per extra adult and £7 per child, charges two adults and a child £35 a night, and the booking form adds the people up as the guest picks their party. Dogs work the same way: none included, £4 each a night.

For something hired on top of the people, such as a pre-pitched tent, say the price includes 0 adults: the tent's nightly price is charged whatever the party, and every person is added at the per-person rates. Set the ages that count as a child under Settings → Age bands, where under-threes (or whatever age you choose) can be free.

Minimum and maximum stays

Set Minimum nights on the pitch type and no booking shorter than that can be made, on your website, in the widgets, from a booking link or in your own dashboard. A Maximum nights is optional and works the same way.

To ask for longer stays at busy times, give a season its own minimum when you set its price under Seasons: one night in May and three over the August bank holiday, say. A stay that crosses seasons takes the highest minimum of any night in it.

Guests see the rule before they hit it. When they pick dates, the booking page works out the minimum for those dates and tells them, and the server checks again when the booking is submitted, so it can't be sidestepped.

Minimums follow dates, not days of the week. If you want two-night weekends outside your seasons, make a season that covers those weekends and give it the minimum.

Capacity

For on-site accommodation, Sleeps is the standard occupancy and Max Sleeps an optional upper limit. For camping pitches, the maximum persons and maximum dogs settings do the same job. The booking form enforces these — a guest can't book six people into a pod that sleeps four. Who counts as an adult, a child or an infant, and whether infants take a place, is set once for the whole site under age bands.

What guests see

Each pitch type carries its own description, amenity list (WiFi, fire pit, shower, and so on) and photo gallery — JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 10 MB each, with one photo markable as featured. Photos are added on the pitch type's edit screen after you've created it.

This is what appears on your Campiamo website, in the booking widgets and on the booking form, so it is worth doing properly: the pitch type page is your sales page.

When it can be booked

By default, a pitch type is bookable whenever your property is open — it simply follows the open season you set in property settings.

If part of your site runs to different dates — glamping that only opens for summer, say — switch on Only bookable within set dates for that pitch type and give it its own recurring periods (you can add more than one, and they can wrap the year end). These work within the property's season: both have to say yes. Windows cover the nights a guest can stay, so a pop-up site open on Friday and Saturday nights sets a window from the Friday to the Saturday, and guests check out on the Sunday as normal.

Separately, you can block one-off calendar ranges on a pitch type — maintenance, a private event — which apply on top of everything above.

How many pitch types your plan allows

Your plan sets the number of pitch types across your account:

• Starter (free) — 3 pitch types
• Growth — 10 pitch types
• Professional and Enterprise — unlimited

The limit counts pitch types, not pitches. One "electric grass pitch" type covering 30 physical pitches is one type. Switched-off types count too. If you ever want to move to a smaller plan, you'll need to be within its limit first — the billing page tells you exactly what's in the way. Full plan details are on the pricing page.

One multi-unit type, or several single-unit types?

The general rule: if guests wouldn't pay more for one over the other, they belong in the same pitch type. Thirty grass pitches that all cost the same are one type with quantity 30 — one price to maintain, one calendar, and Campiamo juggles the units for you. A pitch by the lake that commands a premium is its own type.

Two things push the other way:

• Genuinely different units. If your three cabins differ in what they are — one sleeps two, one sleeps six, one has a hot tub — they need separate types, because price, capacity and photos live on the type.
• Channel sync. Calendar connections to Booking.com, Airbnb and the rest link one pitch type to one listing, and the calendar format can't say "3 of 5 left" — a night is either free or busy. A multi-unit pitch type on a calendar connection stops selling all its units the moment one is booked. If a unit will be listed on a channel, model it as its own single-unit pitch type. The channel sync guide covers this in full.

Getting this wrong is fixable but tedious: bookings sit on the pitch type they were made against, so restructuring later means moving them. Ten minutes of thought now saves an afternoon later.

Two types on the same pitches

Sometimes one kind of unit physically stands on another's pitches. A pop-up site has 50 camping pitches, and on five of them it sets up pre-pitched bell tents. The tents need their own pitch type — their own price, photos, two-night minimum and a quantity of five — but there are still only 50 pitches, and a weekend with five tents and 46 campers is overbooked by one.

Set this on the pitch type that stands on the other's pitches. On its form, under Shares pitches with, choose the type whose pitches it uses, the camping pitch in this example. From then on:

• every booking of the bell tent also takes one of the 50 camping pitches, so the campsite can never be booked past 50;
• the bell tent can still only be booked five times a night, its own quantity;
• when the camping pitches are full, bell tents are sold out too, even if fewer than five are booked, and the date pickers strike those nights out;
• reducing the camping pitch's quantity is checked against both types' bookings;
• channel connections see the shared availability as well.

Each type keeps its own price, capacity, photos and stay rules. You can only share one level deep: a type that others share with cannot itself share another type's pitches. The camping pitch keeps its full quantity, 50 here, not 45 — the sharing does the arithmetic.

Reducing the number of units

You can raise a pitch type's quantity at any time. Lowering it is checked: Campiamo looks at every future booking and works out the most that will ever be in use at once. If you try to reduce below that, the change is refused and the error tells you the number in the way — because going below it would turn real, paid-for bookings into an overbooking. Move or cancel the overlapping bookings first.

Switching off vs deleting

Set a pitch type's status to inactive and it disappears from your website, the widgets and the booking form — but it keeps its settings, photos and its entire booking history, and you can switch it back on whenever you like. This is the right choice for anything seasonal, retired, or under refurbishment.

Deleting is permanent. It takes the pitch type's bookings, photos and prices with it, and any channel connection linked to it is left pointing at nothing.

Never delete a pitch type that has taken bookings. Deleting removes its booking records — including past stays you may need for records or accounts. Switch it off instead; an inactive pitch type costs you nothing.