Hartswood Holiday Park
A brochure site rebuilt as a commission-free direct-booking platform, run entirely from the owners' phones
Client
Hartswood Holiday Park
Sector
Hospitality & Leisure
Duration
Ongoing partnership
Key Result
Commission-free direct bookings
Overview
Hartswood Holiday Park near Malton runs three cottages and three glamping pods. Every booking was arriving through an online travel agency, and every booking carried a commission. The brief was to replace a static brochure site with a direct-booking platform that undercuts the OTA channel by 10% and takes bookings without paying anyone a cut — operated day to day from a mobile phone, with no ongoing developer dependency.
The Challenge
The existing site was a brochure. It showed the park but could not take a booking, so all demand was funnelled through the OTA channel and every stay lost a percentage of its value to commission.
Availability lived in the channel calendar. Any direct booking system had to respect OTA-booked dates automatically, or the park would face double bookings on six separate properties.
The owners have no desktop. Anything they had to manage — bookings, pricing, block-out dates, photos, page copy — needed to work properly on a phone, or it would not get used.
A legacy .com domain carried the park's existing search equity and inbound links, and could not simply be switched off.
Our Solution
We built a mobile-first, six-property site with a hero slideshow, facilities, offers, a surrounding-area guide, a Google reviews page and contact — wrapped in a forest green and gold identity with a custom oak-tree logo and favicon and Cormorant Garamond display type. Around 190 professionally harvested property photos sit across six galleries.
The booking engine pulls and refreshes live availability per property from the channel calendar, so OTA-booked dates are blocked automatically. A Sykes-style 'duration first, arrival second' picker enforces a two-night minimum plus occupancy and dog limits, and the price breakdown is fully transparent: listed rate, direct rate at 10% less, nights total.
Checkout runs on bank transfer with generated payment references. All pricing and availability is validated server-side in the database, so nothing can be tampered with from the browser. The flow auto-advances and auto-scrolls, with a sticky mobile action bar throughout.
Notifications fan out on every booking: a branded guest confirmation email carrying bank details and the payment window, an admin alert email, SMS to three mobiles via GatewayAPI, and WhatsApp alerting. Every message is logged against the booking with duplicate-send guards and a resend control.
The admin is mobile-only by design. Bookings, enquiries, take-a-booking, availability, block-out dates and pricing all run on one unified UK-format (dd/mm/yyyy) calendar system, alongside a full CMS covering every page's copy, images, facilities, offers, reviews, contact details, menu and footer, plus per-property galleries with drag-reorder and upload. Role-based access is enforced with server-side permission checks.
Traffic analytics are built in — views, unique visitors, 30-day trend, top pages, device and source breakdown — with no third-party tracker. The legacy .com domain was redirected with 301s on every old URL, and the new site ships sitemap, robots, JSON-LD (LodgingBusiness and WebSite) and per-page metadata.
The Results
Removed on direct bookings
OTA commission
10% below listed rate
Guest saving
Run entirely from a phone
Operations
Zero for content or pricing
Developer dependency
Services we used
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