Hipcamp Review: 11,765 UK Campsites, and the Whole Stay Paid at Booking

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Hipcamp lists 11,765 campsites in the United Kingdom, and its own hosting guide puts a basic tent pitch at £15 to £30 a night, a motorhome pitch with hook-ups at £25 to £60 or more, and a yurt, cabin or treehouse at £75 to £200 and upwards. Searching and booking costs the camper nothing in commission: the platform takes 12.5% plus VAT out of the landowner’s side instead, and listing is free. Figures read on 14 November 2026 from Hipcamp’s own UK pages and help centre.

The company was founded in 2013 by Alyssa Ravasio, who still runs it, and it now operates in four countries — the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. What it sells is not a holiday park. Most of the inventory is private land: working farms, vineyards, woodland and fields where the pitch exists because a landowner decided to open a gate, which is why the search results contain places no park operator has ever listed. Hipcamp came to Britain in 2022 by buying the company behind the Cool Camping guidebooks, and the UK business you contract with today is that same company renamed.

One thing to know before you start comparing. Hipcamp takes the entire cost of the stay on the card the moment the booking is made — there is no deposit and no balance due later, which is how most of the rest of this category works. The booking total, including a camper service fee shown at the checkout step, is charged at once, and what comes back if you change your mind depends on which of eight cancellation ladders the landowner picked.

£300 on the card, and where £45 of it goes

Hipcamp is one of the clearer platforms in this trade about its own cut, and the figure is in a help centre article it keeps current — last updated on 8 November 2026. Listing is “100% free”, with no setup fee, no monthly contract and no minimum term. Once bookings start, “Hipcamp takes a 12.5% plus VAT commission on your earnings”, and card processing is separate: “Stripe charges a small processing fee of 1.4%+20p”.

Put a £300 week through that and the arithmetic is unusually easy to follow. The 12.5% commission is £37.50, the VAT on it is £7.50, so £45.00 of the £300 is Hipcamp’s. Stripe’s 1.4% is £4.20 plus 20p, which is £4.40. The landowner is left with about £250.60, or a fraction over 83p in the pound. At the standard VAT rate the platform’s take is therefore 15% of the pitch price, and that multiplication is worth doing yourself before setting the figure beside a platform that quotes its commission with the tax already inside it.

What the commission is said to buy is listed rather than left vague: Stripe payment processing, marketing across email, social advertising, brand partnerships, search and public relations, insurance cover for eligible hosts, seven-day-a-week support from local Hipcamp guides, advocacy for the right to host, and platform development tracked on a public roadmap. A host booking statement breaks the money down line by line — base price per night, occupancy tax collected, additional guest fee per night, extras, cleaning fee, then the subtotal, the host service fee and the earnings — and it can be opened from the calendar, the bookings tab, the message thread or the payouts tab.

None of that lands on the camper as commission. The price on the listing is the price the landowner set, and the platform is paid out of it.

The fee you pay, which nobody has written down

There is a second fee, and it is yours. Hipcamp’s booking walkthrough says the subtotal you see after entering dates and party size “excludes applicable taxes and service fees”, that the fee and the booking total appear at the rulebook step before you agree to continue, and that on both instant and request-to-book listings “you will be charged the booking total at this time”. So the fee is disclosed before you commit, on screen and again on the receipt.

What it is has never been published. No article in the UK help centre states the camper service fee as a percentage or a range. The one document that explains it at all — titled “What is the Hipcamp service fee?”, last updated 9 November 2026 — sits in the American help centre, says the amount is proportional to the cost of the booking without giving the proportion, and quotes the only hard number anywhere: “There is a minimum $3 service fee per booking”. Asked for the same article in the British help centre, the site returns nothing at all.

That matters on a cancellation rather than on a booking. Hipcamp’s cancellation article is explicit that its fees come off every refund — each of the eight policies promises a full or half refund “minus Hipcamp fees” — and the refund article, updated on 17 October 2026, tells you an eligible refund is issued immediately and may take 7 to 10 working days to reach the bank, without ever saying what has been deducted. The fee is described as generally non-refundable except in extenuating circumstances. There is one clean exception, and it is to Hipcamp’s credit: if the landowner is the one who cannot accommodate you, support processes “full refunds in these cases, including all fees”, and will look for a comparable pitch on the same dates.

Eight ladders, and the one the landowner happened to choose

Hipcamp does not set a cancellation policy. Each host picks one of eight, from the dashboard, and the choice applies only to bookings made afterwards. Super Flexible refunds in full any time before check-in. Flexible needs 24 hours, Moderate three days, Strict one week, and there are 14-day and 21-day versions of Strict. Super Strict pays half back at one week and nothing inside it; Super Strict (30 days) pays half back at 30 days and nothing inside that. Every figure is measured from the “check in after” time the host set, so with a 2pm check-in and a Flexible policy, cancelling at 1pm the day before is a full refund and 5pm the same evening is nothing.

The policy is shown in the listing, shown again with an agreement step before the booking confirms, and printed on the confirmation page. Hipcamp can override it for extenuating circumstances. Note also that the British help centre offers hosts eight options where the American one offers nine, so a policy exists in the system that a UK landowner cannot select.

The reason the host’s choice carries so much weight is that nothing sits underneath it. The fourteen-day cooling-off right that attaches to almost everything else bought online does not reach a campsite booking: regulation 28(1)(h) of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 takes out of the regime “the supply of accommodation, transport of goods, vehicle rental services, catering or services related to leisure activities, if the contract provides for a specific date or period of performance”. A pitch booked for a named weekend is exactly that. On a platform that holds a 15% deposit, the gap between the ladder and the law costs you 15%. On one that has already taken the whole stay, the ladder the landowner picked is the entire protection you have, which is a good reason to open the policy before the dates.

A million dollars of cover, and not a pound of it is the camper’s

Hipcamp provides liability insurance to eligible hosts at no extra charge on valid, uncancelled bookings, and it publishes the limits, the exclusions and the eligibility rule on one page — more than most platforms in this category do. For the United Kingdom, as for the United States, Canada and France, the cover is $1,000,000 per occurrence for third-party bodily injury with a $5,000,000 annual aggregate, and $250,000 per occurrence and $1,000,000 aggregate for incidents involving a host’s animals, dogs included. Australia gets AU$10,000,000. A separate Host Property Protection Plan reimburses up to $10,000 of damage a camper causes, and the page says plainly that it “is not an insurance policy and does not replace homeowners or commercial insurance”. Damage must be reported within 14 days of checkout or before the next check-in, whichever comes first, and a review takes two to three weeks. Hosts with a liability claim on a home or renters policy in the past three years are not eligible at all.

Three things about that cover are worth a camper’s attention. The first is whose it is: the policy “covers Hipcamp and eligible registered Hosts for third-party bodily injury claims”. Campers are not named as insured, and the platform is. The second is that the yearly ceiling is not per site — “the aggregate limits noted are measured on an annual basis and are shared by Hipcamp and all insured Hosts”, and Hipcamp’s own hosting pages put the number of people hosting above 20,000. One annual pot of $5,000,000 across all of them is a thinner thing than the per-occurrence figure suggests.

The third is the currency and the paperwork. Every limit for a British host is quoted in American dollars; no sterling figure appears anywhere on the page, and no insurer or underwriter is named, so there is nothing to look up on the Financial Conduct Authority register and no policy document to read. The exclusions, by contrast, are specific: alcohol where the host contributed to intoxication, firearms, bows, knives and hunting, fireworks, rock climbing, aircraft, motor vehicles and watercraft, horseback riding, dogs with a bite history, abuse, pollution, employment liability and communicable disease. The Property Protection Plan separately excludes animals, trees and plants, moving vehicles, shared areas, personal items, wear and tear, lost income and unexplained loss.

For the camper’s own tent, bike or camera the position is stated and it is not generous: “Hipcampers are solely responsible for their personal property during a Hipcamp trip”, with a recommendation to insure the gear, a police report for theft by a third party, and a support ticket if the damage was done by another camper. There is no limit, payout or deductible, because there is nothing to pay out of.

What is checked before a field goes on sale

Hipcamp publishes host standards and they are not token. Hosts must follow local fire bans outright — “If a fire ban is in effect, do not allow fires on your property” — list area hazards such as ticks, wildlife and strong currents, set a maximum occupancy for each pitch, share emergency numbers beyond 999 and the nearest hospital, survey the land before hosting, keep off low-lying flood-prone ground, reply to enquiries within 24 hours, and observe quiet hours of 10pm to 8am unless the area already has its own. A toilet of some kind is required: “A permitted toilet of some kind (indoor, portable-style, composting etc.) is required if you’re hosting tent campers.” Bookings are expected to be honoured, and “[u]nwarranted cancellations can impact how your listing appears in search results and even result in deactivation”.

What is checked, as against expected, is thinner. The vetting article, updated on 15 September 2026, says “All new Hosts must verify their identity in order to Host on Hipcamp”, and that is the only check it describes. Beyond it there are contractual promises in the terms about serious criminal charges, the insurance-claim history rule, an inclusion policy, a verified-unit badge, a public review process and internal quality assurance. No site visit, no inspection and no required document other than identity appears anywhere. A certificated location run under a camping club scheme gets an annual visit from a club officer and a licensed holiday park gets conditions its council can enforce; a field listed here gets a verified postcode.

Two of Hipcamp’s own live pages also disagree about the smallest plot it will take. The host standards say back gardens are generally not a fit, “especially back gardens under 1 acre”; the suitability article, updated on 11 November 2026, puts small residential gardens “under 2 acres” in the unsuitable list. One of those is wrong and there is no way to tell which from outside, so neither figure should be relied on — if you are a landowner with a paddock between the two, ask before you photograph it. And the toilet rule has a camper-facing article beside it explaining what to do when there isn’t one: check the “What this site offers” panel, and if it says no toilet is provided, bring a portable one. Both statements can be true at once — a host may provide the toilet by requiring the guest to — but the listing panel is the thing to read, not the standard.

The host library, and the line at the bottom of every page

The best thing Hipcamp has built in Britain is not on the booking side at all. Its journal carries a set of guides to the law a UK landowner has to get right before a pitch can exist: the permitted development rights that let a recreational campsite run for up to 60 days a calendar year in England with no more than 50 pitches, the 28-day general right that applies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, how to apply for planning permission, what changes inside a national park, a national landscape or a site of special scientific interest, what the camping clubs’ certificate schemes allow, and how many toilets and showers a site needs. The statutory wording behind the English rule is real and checkable — Class BC of Part 4 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order carries the 60-day limit, the 50-pitch cap, a duty to provide toilet and waste disposal on site, written notice to the planning authority every year with a site plan and the dates, and a prior-approval route with a flood risk assessment where the land is in Flood Zone 2 or 3. No other campsite platform in this comparison publishes any of it.

Two caveats, and they are the provider’s own. Every guide ends by saying it is the Hipcamp team’s reading of the regulations rather than legal advice, that no responsibility is taken for errors or omissions, and that professional advice is recommended. And the library is ageing: the pop-up campsite guide was first published on 18 March 2023 and last updated on 7 June 2024, and the guide to the clubs’ certificate schemes was last touched on 19 September 2023. A page of planning and licensing figures that has not been revisited for two and a half years is a page to read and then verify, which is exactly what its own footer asks you to do.

For a camper the library is still useful, for a reason Hipcamp does not spell out. A listing does not tell you which rulebook the pitch is standing on, and the three regimes buy very different things. Sixty nights a year is a short season, and a site running on that right has to put the land back as it was outside its dates, so a field that was there in July may not be bookable in October.

Eleven thousand, one thousand, or half a million

Hipcamp’s scale is stated in four places and the four do not agree. The British country page counts 11,765 campsites in the United Kingdom. The British home page offers “over 1,000 camping and glamping sites” that you “won’t find anywhere else” — which may be a deliberately narrower claim about exclusive private land, though nothing says so. The footer and the British about page both advertise “over 500,000” public lands, resorts and private sites, a global figure sitting on a UK page with no label. And the press kit, whose own copyright line still reads 2025, says “more than 140,000 bookable campsites” across “5M acres of land” on three continents. Only one of the four carries a date. For comparison, Hipcamp operates in four countries and reckons more than 20,000 people host on it.

The same looseness shows up in the currency. Hipcamp’s guidance on host earnings quotes British price bands throughout — £15 to £30 for a basic pitch, £75 to £200 and more for glamping, over £10,000 a year for most hosts and over £100,000 for the top ones — and then gives one of its own annual examples as “$25,000–$75,000+” while the band directly below it is in pounds. The optional Sensible Weather Guarantee is served from the British help centre, pays out on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts, remits by PayPal or ACH, and says in its own text that the product is offered “for all qualifying bookings in the U.S.”. The host standards send a British landowner to look up “zoning codes, building codes, and county ordinances”, none of which exist here, on the same page that correctly explains VAT registration and the number 999. And the article on a camper’s damaged property advises against pitching under trees that could drop “pinecones, branches, or coconuts”.

None of that costs anybody money. What does is the document underneath it. The terms of use carry two last-updated dates: the non-European set was revised on 26 March 2026, and the European set — the one that governs, since “AS A USER SITUATED IN THE EEA, SWITZERLAND OR THE UNITED KINGDOM, YOU ARE CONTRACTING WITH HIPCAMP UK LTD” — was last revised on 16 May 2024. British users are reading a contract twenty-two months older than the American one. It is the better of the two in substance: it promises that “we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract”, where the American version caps liability at the greater of the amount Hipcamp kept and $100. But it is the half of the document that has not been maintained, and it is the half that applies here.

Shelton Street, and the company that used to publish guidebooks

The British entity has a longer history than the brand. Hipcamp UK Limited is company 05577942, incorporated on 29 September 2005 as Punk Publishing Limited — the imprint behind the Cool Camping guidebooks — renamed Tripadee Limited on 23 February 2018, and renamed again to Hipcamp UK Limited on 16 March 2022. Its SIC code is 79110, travel agency activities. The registered office moved from Summit House, 170 Finchley Road, London NW3 6BP to 71–75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ on 3 November 2025, which is a company formation address rather than an office anyone camps near. Alyssa Lea Ravasio, appointed on 3 September 2021, is the only current officer of any kind: Jonathan Knight, a director from the day the company was formed in 2005, resigned on 31 July 2024, and the company secretary’s appointment ended on 29 September 2025. Hipcamp, Inc. of San Francisco has been the person with significant control since 3 September 2021.

The register also shows how close the company came to not existing. A first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off was published on 21 December 2021 and discontinued four days later on 25 December 2021, three weeks before the accounting period was extended to 31 December 2021 and under three months before the Hipcamp name went on the door. That is history rather than a warning, but it is the sort of history worth knowing about the company that holds your money between booking and arrival.

Two things the filings do not give you. There is no measure of the business: every set of accounts since has been filed under the small-company regime, so no turnover, no profit and no commission income has ever been published, and every scale figure above is the company’s own marketing. And the accounts have been late three years running. A private company must file within nine months of its period end; the accounts to 31 December 2023 were filed on 3 October 2024, those to 31 December 2024 on 23 October 2025, and those to 31 December 2025 on 27 October 2026 — three days, 23 days and 27 days past the deadline respectively. It is a small, administrative failing and it is also the one thing on the public record that can be measured rather than claimed.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 14 November 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.