About our crawler

If you operate a campsite or a booking system and you found this page in your server logs, this explains who we are, what we did, and how to make us stop.

Our requests identify themselves as:

Vacamp/1.0 (+https://vacamp.app/bots)

What Vacamp is

Vacamp is a map of European campsites that shows real availability and prices for the dates a traveller is actually looking at, instead of sending them to check twenty booking pages by hand. Every campsite we can quote links back to its own booking system. We do not take bookings, we do not take a commission, and we are not a reseller — the reservation happens on your site, with your terms and your customer.

What we fetch

• Public pages of campsite websites, to work out which booking system a site uses and which account it is on that system.
• Read-only availability endpoints of that booking system — the same catalogue and availability calls the site's own booking widget makes in a visitor's browser, using the account handle the site publishes in its own page.

We never send a request that creates, holds, modifies or cancels a reservation, and we never touch payment endpoints. Where an integration is written against a system that has such endpoints, they are named in that integration's source comments specifically to record that nothing calls them.

How we behave

• We identify ourselves honestly. We do not impersonate a browser, and we do not forge Referer or Origin headers to look like traffic from your own site.
• We do not defeat bot protection. If a host challenges us, we treat that as a no and back off — with an increasing cooldown, up to 30 days.
• We use no credentials that are not published. We only ever use an account handle a site publishes in its own HTML for its own widget, and only against the account that published it. We do not reuse a vendor's shared keys, and we do not try one customer's handle against another's.
• We rate-limit hard. Requests to a given host go through a shared budget with a concurrency cap and enforced spacing between requests — shared across all our servers, not per-server. Answers are cached, so a popular campsite is not re-asked the same question repeatedly.
• We back off on errors. Failures trigger exponential backoff, and repeated failures take a site out of rotation entirely.

On robots.txt

We want to be straight with you rather than quietly rely on a technicality: our crawler does not currently parse robots.txt. We are telling you that here because you would otherwise have to discover it, and because it means the opt-out above is the mechanism that actually works — not a fallback.

What we do instead is make ourselves identifiable and easy to stop, keep our request volume low enough not to matter to your infrastructure, and act on every request we get. If you would rather express your preference through robots.txt than through email, tell us and we will honour it as an opt-out for your hosts.

What happens when you opt out

We record the opt-out against your campsite, or against your whole platform if that is what you asked for. From then on:

• we stop fetching your pages and your booking system entirely;
• we stop showing live availability or prices for the affected campsites;
• the opt-out is permanent and survives redeploys — it is not a cooldown that quietly expires.

We aim to confirm within two business days. Campsites that opt out remain on the map as ordinary map entries, drawn from public OpenStreetMap data, with no live data and a link to your own site — unless you would prefer to be removed altogether, which we will also do on request.

Other things we read

Campsite locations come from OpenStreetMap, under the Open Database License. We query public OpenStreetMap infrastructure through the same rate limiting described above.

Contact

support@vacamp.app — opt-outs, corrections, questions about a specific request in your logs, or anything else. A human reads it.

Vacamp · Support · Privacy policy