For booking systems
This page is for the people who build and run campsite reservation systems. It explains what we would like to agree with you, what we commit to in return, and how to say yes or no.
The short version. We show live availability for campsites, and those campsites are on your platform. We would rather read your system with your permission and on terms you set than rely on the fact that the data is public. We are asking for read-only access to availability and rates — an API key, a documented partner endpoint, a rate limit, or simply your written OK to keep using the public endpoints your customers' own widgets call.
What Vacamp is
Vacamp is a map of European campsites that shows whether a site has space for the dates a traveller is actually looking at. Today most campers check twenty booking pages by hand; we do that lookup for them and hand them straight to the campsite's own booking flow.
We are not a reseller and not an OTA. We take no bookings and no commission. The reservation happens on your system, with your terms, your customer and your margin. Every campsite we can quote links back to its own booking page — for a platform, that is qualified demand arriving at your funnel with the availability question already answered.
What we are asking for
- Read-only availability and rates for the campsites that are your customers: the unit catalogue, and whether a given stay is free and at what total.
- A way to identify ourselves — an API key or account, so our traffic is attributable to us and you can rate-limit, audit or cut it off independently of everyone else's.
- A rate limit you are comfortable with, which we will implement as a hard cap rather than a target.
If you have a partner programme, we would like to apply to it. If you do not, a one paragraph email saying what we may and may not call is enough to work with.
What we commit to in return
| Attribution | Your system named as the source on every campsite it powers, in the app and in our public coverage reports. |
|---|---|
| No booking, ever | We never call an endpoint that creates, holds, modifies or cancels a reservation, and never touch payment endpoints. Where such endpoints exist in a system we have integrated, they are named in our source comments specifically to record that nothing calls them. |
| Rate limits | Requests to a host share a global budget with a concurrency cap and enforced spacing, across all our servers rather than per server. Answers are cached, so a popular campsite is not re-asked the same question repeatedly. |
| Honest identification | Every request carries Vacamp/1.0 (+https://vacamp.app/bots). We do
not impersonate a browser or forge Referer or Origin
headers. |
| Revocation | One email switches us off — for one campsite, or for your entire platform. It takes effect within a minute of us recording it, and it is permanent rather than a cooldown that quietly expires. |
| Your customers' own choice | An individual campsite on your platform can opt out directly, without going through you, and we honour that the same way. |
What happens while we wait for your answer
When we send a request to a booking system, we switch our integration for that system off until we hear back, and the app says so: the coverage screen lists your system as waiting for approval, with live availability disabled for the campsites on it.
We do this because a request you can refuse at no cost to us is not much of a request. It also means we are not asking you to bless something we are already doing behind your back.
Two things we would rather state plainly than have you infer:
- Not every system on the map has been asked yet. We are working through them one at a time, and a system that carries no approval note on our coverage screen has not necessarily approved anything — most simply have not been contacted yet. We will not imply otherwise to you or to anyone else.
- Silence keeps us switched off. If you do not reply, the integration stays disabled. We will not treat a non-answer as a yes.
If the answer is no
Then it is no, and we would still like to hear it, because a decline is a decision we can record and act on where silence is just a hole in the map. We record it as a permanent opt-out covering your whole platform: we stop fetching your system, we stop showing live availability for the campsites on it, and those campsites stay on the map as ordinary entries drawn from public OpenStreetMap data with a link to their own website.
You do not owe us a justification and we will not ask for one.
What we do today, stated plainly
We think you should know exactly what you are approving or refusing. Our integrations read the same public catalogue and availability endpoints that a campsite's own booking widget calls in a visitor's browser, using the account handle that the campsite publishes in its own HTML, and only against the account that published it. We do not use a vendor's shared keys, and we do not try one customer's handle against another's. The full description is on our crawler page, including the parts that are less flattering to us.
Get in touch
support@vacamp.app — approvals, questions, rate limits, or a request that we stop. A human reads it, and you will get a real answer rather than a form.