Higher Town Farm is a National Trust campsite located in Lansallos, Cornwall. With no formal pitches, rangers look after the site, and any online tools that help them to automate the booking process for the campsite are a huge help. Adopting Inn Style for online bookings has enabled completely automated, 24 hour a day bookings and secure payments, freeing up the rangers’ time so they can concentrate on looking after the important natural qualities of the area.
Lucy Honeychurch, one of the team at Higher Town Farm, explains: “It was important for us to be able to add online booking to our website. We do get some ‘walk-in’ customers but the vast majority of campers want to book online. The main benefit is out of hours bookings. It doesn’t matter if our office is manned or not, bookings can still be made. Payments too. All the transactions happen securely online. We don’t have to worry about handling money and payments. It’s all done securely, online and is managed by our finance team service centre.”
Higher Town Farm is, like many campsites in the UK, a seasonal site. “We operate from Easter through to the half term holiday in October. You’d have to be very hardy indeed to camp in January in Cornwall!” jokes Honeychurch. “The rangers are still here though, carrying out essential work to look after the landscape for everyone.
“We always get lots of bookings in January. As soon as the New Year starts, people start thinking about their holidays and booking their camping pitches. Campsites are always busy in July and August during the school holidays. We’ve noticed an added benefit, since we introduced online booking. We’re finding that we are getting more advanced bookings in the shoulder months – May to June and September.” www.innstyle.co.uk
