Pay stations, ticket machines and payment kiosks: why the hardware on your site is your weakest point

Picture this. It's seven in the morning and your phone rings. It's the motorhomer on pitch 12: "I think someone had a go at the machine by the entrance last night, it's all bent." You get down to the site and it's exactly what you feared: the door forced, the screen smashed, the coins gone. The haul? Maybe eighty quid. The repair quote? A few thousand. And in the meantime your payment kiosk, the thing that was supposed to let the site run itself, is a dead lump of metal that will eat up weeks of engineers, quotes and crime reference numbers.

If you're planning a motorhome site, or thinking about automating the one you already have, someone has probably offered you the classic package: a pay station at the entrance, a ticket machine, a card terminal on a post. It looks like the only road to a self-service site. In this article you'll see why it isn't: what a payment machine really costs over its lifetime (spoiler: the purchase price is only the start), why it's a favourite target for thieves and vandals, what the cash inside it costs you, and why the market, from council car parks to motorhome sites, is heading the other way: getting rid of payment hardware altogether.

What a payment machine really costs (it isn't the list price)

Let's start with your wallet, because that's where the surprises begin. Manufacturers of pay stations and parking machines rarely publish prices: you only find out with a quote or, more reliably, by reading UK council papers. And the numbers are instructive.

• In June 2026, Maldon District Council in Essex asked its committee to replace its pay and display machines, installed only in 2018, because "key components are obsolete". The officers' report compares two offers for 12 new machines: buying them would cost £99,975 over five years, or about £8,331 per machine; renting them would cost £162,000, or £13,500 per machine. In both cases, the report notes, the council stays liable for theft and vandalism (Maldon District Council report).
• In 2023, the London Borough of Bromley decided not to replace its ageing machines at all, rejecting what it called "the near £1million cost for installing new machines" and moving to app payments instead (Bromley Council).

And those are street parking machines. A car park pay station with a barrier, a reader and a ticket dispenser is a more complex piece of kit.

But the purchase price is just the starter. On top come the installation (concrete base, ducting, power supply, connectivity) and the running costs: maintenance contracts, spare parts, paper rolls for receipts, data SIMs, software updates, cash collection. Maldon's own figures show it clearly: even the machines it buys outright come with a five-year price tag, because keeping that object alive is a cost in itself.

For a site with 20-30 pitches, you're looking at a five-figure upfront investment and a recurring bill every year just to keep a payment point working. Before you sign, it's worth asking: will this machine help me earn more, or just make me pay more?

A cash box in the middle of a field: theft and vandalism

There's a blunt but accurate way to describe a payment machine on an unstaffed site: it's a cash box left unattended in the middle of a field, often on the edge of town, often at night. And the local news in the UK keeps telling us how that ends.

In Lancaster and Morecambe, between the end of August and early October 2024, ten pay and display machines were damaged, each time with the cash box cut open and the coins taken. The city council put the total loss to taxpayers at around £40,000, including replacement machines, and suspended cash payments at most of its car parks, leaving card and RingGo as the ways to pay. In the words of the cabinet member, the council had "no other option while a gang of thieves is actively targeting our car parks" (Beyond Radio). In Cheshire East, back in 2020, an organised gang hit more than 20 machines in Macclesfield, Crewe, Nantwich and Congleton: around £15,000 stolen and around £10,000 of damage (TheBusinessDesk).

The same pattern comes up again and again: the damage to the machine is often as big as, or bigger than, the cash stolen. Whoever breaks into a pay station doesn't "withdraw": they wreck. And you don't just lose a few days' takings; you lose the machine, your time, your peace of mind, and you take nothing until the engineer turns up.

A motorhome site, by its nature, makes things worse: it's often outside town, poorly lit, and unstaffed precisely because you've automated it. Ideal conditions for working undisturbed.

Cash: the invisible tax you pay every day

Even on the good days, when nobody touches your machine, the cash inside it is costing you money. It's a silent cost, and that's what makes it dangerous: it never arrives as an invoice, but as lost hours and eroded margin.

It's all in there: the time spent counting and reconciling, the trips to a bank or post office that may now be miles away, deposit charges, security, insurance, discrepancies. And when the cash sits inside a machine on a site, you add the cost of emptying it: coins don't collect themselves.

Imagine Pete, who runs a 25-pitch site by a lake. Every Monday morning he opens the pay station, takes home a bag of coins, counts it on the kitchen table, and every so often the total doesn't match the tickets issued: a tenner here, thirty pounds there. By the end of the season, between discrepancies, a replaced lock and afternoons lost queuing to bank the takings, his "automatic payments" have cost him as much as a month of pitch fees. The point isn't that someone is robbing him: it's that cash, by its very nature, loses bits at every step. Every digital pound, on the other hand, arrives already counted, recorded and paid in.

Obsolescence: when the network switches your machine off

There's another risk no hardware salesperson will be keen to mention: the technology you buy today has an expiry date, and you don't get to choose it.

The textbook case is the switch-off of 2G and 3G networks. When Verizon shut down its 3G network in the United States, the city of Honolulu woke up in January 2023 to about 2,200 parking meters that could no longer take card payments. "Unfortunately, we were caught off guard," admitted the city's transportation director (Civil Beat).

In the UK the same thing has already happened. EE and Vodafone completed their 3G switch-off in early 2024, Three by around November 2024, and Virgin Media O2 was the last to wrap up, with a few sites lingering into early 2026. Under the plan agreed with the government, all 2G and 3G networks will be phased out by 2033 (The Register). Bromley council saw it coming: one of the reasons it gave for removing its machines was that "the SIM cards in the machines will soon stop working as the 3G technology is switched off nationally".

And it isn't only the network. Maldon's machines lasted barely eight years before the supplier confirmed that key components were obsolete; a like-for-like replacement wasn't even possible, because the manufacturer no longer makes them. Card-terminal standards change, coins and notes change, and every change is an upgrade to pay for or a machine to replace. The one you buy today could run out of spare parts before it has paid for itself.

A sign with a QR code, by comparison, has no firmware to update: the technology lives in your guest's phone and in cloud software, both of which update themselves.

Your guests have already decided: they pay by phone

So far we've talked about costs and risks. But there's an even more important question: do your guests actually want to use that payment machine?

The numbers say no. According to UK Finance's UK Payment Markets 2026 report, cash made up just 8% of all UK payments in 2025, down from 45% in 2015, while contactless accounted for 39%. Around 37.6 million people, more than six in ten adults, are registered for a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, and 58% of adults use mobile payments at least once a month.

Parking shows the same shift. In Maldon, nearly half of all parking payments already go through digital channels, which is why the council is cutting its machines from 21 to 12 and moving to contactless-only machines and, where appropriate, ticketless parking. In Bromley, the council said "the vast majority of drivers already pay online to park" before making the RingGo app the main way to pay in its car parks.

For a motorhome site there's one more factor: many of the visitors who come over on the ferry are from some of Europe's most cashless countries. In the Netherlands, according to the Dutch central bank (DNB), only about one in five shop payments is made in cash. And across the euro area cash fell from 59% to 52% of point-of-sale transactions between 2022 and 2024 (ECB). Besides, a Dutch or German motorhomer rolling in at 9.30pm doesn't have sterling coins in their pocket.

What everyone arriving late wants is to scan, pay with the wallet on their phone and drive in. Every time your site asks for coins, you're giving them a reason to choose the site down the road.

Motorhome travel keeps growing, and it rewards the sites that make arriving easy: we look at the numbers in The motorhome boom in the UK: what it means for site owners.

The alternative: when the payment kiosk becomes a £2 sign

So the question is obvious: if a payment kiosk costs thousands, attracts thieves, eats into your margin with cash handling and ages badly, what goes in its place? The answer is almost provocatively simple: a sign.

The idea is to take the payment point off the site completely. The motorhomer arrives, scans a QR code at the entrance and does everything from their smartphone: sees prices and availability, pays by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, gets the confirmation and opens the barrier or gate. No app to download, no ticket, no coins. Platforms like CamperGate have built the whole flow around this principle: the physical "pay point" is a laminated QR code you print and put up by the barrier, costing a couple of euros (about £2), while payments, check-in and gate openings all happen online, on infrastructure that isn't sitting in your field.

Run the comparison point by point:

• Upfront cost: thousands of pounds versus the price of a laminated print.
• Theft and vandalism: there isn't a penny in a QR code, and if someone tears it down or defaces it you reprint it the same day for less than a cup of coffee: no engineer, no police report, no lost takings.
• Cash: it simply doesn't exist. Every transaction is digital from the start, recorded and paid in.
• Obsolescence: the sign has no circuit boards and no 3G modules; the intelligence sits in software that updates itself.
• Maintenance: none. And the site stays open for business 24 hours a day, even while you're having dinner.

What about guests without a smartphone?

It's a fair objection and it deserves an honest answer. Some older motorhomers still prefer cash, and in the UK that's a real consideration: UK Finance's figures show that only 29% of over-65s were registered for mobile payments in 2025, against 87-89% of under-35s. But almost every adult has a debit card, and the trend is upwards across all age groups. For the remaining cases there are simple solutions that don't need hardware: booking online in advance (perhaps done by a son, daughter or grandchild), taking the payment over the phone, or an arrangement with a nearby shop or pub. Is it worth buying, and defending, a machine costing thousands for the exception, when the rule is happy to pay by phone?

Action plan: how to decide without being sold a lump of metal

If you're thinking about automating your site, here's a practical way to decide with your head rather than the supplier's catalogue:

1. Work out the total cost, not the price. For every hardware quote, ask about installation and groundworks, the annual maintenance contract, spare parts, connectivity, emptying and banking the cash. Project it all over ten years and compare it with a software subscription.
2. Assess the risk. Is your site isolated? Lit? Covered by CCTV? Every "no" makes it more likely the machine becomes a target, and pushes up the cost of insuring it, if you can insure it at all.
3. Look at your real guests. Check where your bookings and visitors come from: if a large share are from overseas or under 60, cash is already a thing of the past for them.
4. Separate access from payment. You still need the barrier or gate; what you don't need is a physical pay point. A digital system works with the gate automation you probably already have.
5. Start with something reversible. A QR code payment flow can be up and running in days with no groundworks: you can trial it for a season and measure the results, which is impossible with a pay station set in concrete.

Once you've done the sums, the conclusion is almost counter-intuitive: the most automated site isn't the one with the most machines, it's the one with the fewest. Every physical object you install is a recurring cost, a target and a piece of technology that ages. Real automation, the kind that makes a site profitable, lives in the software, not in the hardware. If you want to see what that does to the figures, we've set them out in Motorhome site profitability in 2026: revenue, costs and return.