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)
Want us to stop? Email support@vacamp.ai from a domain associated with the site, or from any address that makes the connection clear. Say whether you mean one campsite or every site on your platform. No justification needed — we will not ask you for one.
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
RefererorOriginheaders 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
Every call we make to a booking system honours robots.txt. Before a
request leaves, we read the host's robots.txt (at most every few hours) and
follow the group for Vacamp if there is one, otherwise the group for
*. A path it closes is not fetched.
If the closed path is on a booking system's own servers, we switch our reading of that system off entirely rather than reading around it, and check again every hour; once the path opens, we start again by ourselves. If it is on a campsite's own website, we skip that campsite.
To let us in, add a group for us, naming the path your file closes:
User-agent: Vacamp
Allow: /the/path/we/need/If you run a booking system, your provider page on your Vacamp account shows the
exact lines, and lets you give consent instead. Consent you give there outranks your
robots.txt for us, so you can let us read without changing a file that
other crawlers read too. Write to support@vacamp.ai to get a provider
page.
One thing we want to be straight about: the page reader that works out which booking
system a campsite website uses does not parse robots.txt yet. If you want
that reader to stay away from your site, the opt-out below is what stops it.
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.ai — opt-outs, corrections, questions about a specific request in your logs, or anything else. A human reads it.