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Camping reservations for Ontario Parks are a big mess like this— so much so that people do ridiculous hacks like booking the full two weeks that lead into their

Camping reservations for Ontario Parks are a big mess like this— so much so that people do ridiculous hacks like booking the full two weeks that lead into their desired weekend and later paying a fee to cancel just the first part of it. By the time the actual popular weekend would have come available for online booking, it was already taken weeks earlier.

cecilpl2 5y ago
I wrote a script to poll the Parks Canada reservation system for availability for a camping trip I wanted to do, so that I'd get notified the instant someone cancelled and space became available. Sadly after two weeks they banned my IP for the rest of the year and I was no longer able to make reservations without going through a proxy.
- sequoia 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure they do this on their own now. I set up "notify me" for a site and got tons of emails as sites became available.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  A friend and I made a website based around this called campalert.live We've had to stop doing BC and National Parks as the API changed and we haven't had time to update our end. But Alberta still works!
sequoia 5y ago
Wow, thank you for explaining this!! I was wondering how weekends that were "not yet available for online booking" were already nearly fully booked when I looked on the booking site. Very irritating that people do this... With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and start doing this myself, if that's the price of admission
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  It's definitely a prisoner's dilemma type of situation— no one wants it to be like that, but once there's a critical mass of people doing it, then you kind of have to. Once everyone does, you're back to square one, except with a system based on unwritten rules that are confusing and exclude the uninitiated. And it's not obvious how to fix it in a way that doesn't screw up the system for someone else: - exorbitant cancellation fees would punish people whose plans change, and a lot of people would just swallow the extra cost anyway. - insisting that the entire timeframe be in scope at time of booking would make it hard or impossible to book longer vacations at popular spots (which at this point is basically anything within 4h of Toronto). - making the whole season available at once would create an ultra high stakes feeding frenzy, with the servers probably ending up crashing. - some kind of bidding or lottery setup would be extra complexity, and would end up rewarding people with the time, money, and schedule flexibility to "play" whatever the system is. I suppose the Ontario Parks mandate is to just maximize utilization, so from their point of view it doesn't really matter as long as weekends are booked solid and at least some proportion of the canceled midweek days end up being scooped up later by retirees or whoever.

cecilpl2 5y ago

I wrote a script to poll the Parks Canada reservation system for availability for a camping trip I wanted to do, so that I'd get notified the instant someone cancelled and space became available. Sadly after two weeks they banned my IP for the rest of the year and I was no longer able to make reservations without going through a proxy.

sequoia 5y ago
I'm pretty sure they do this on their own now. I set up "notify me" for a site and got tons of emails as sites became available.
polishdude20 5y ago
A friend and I made a website based around this called campalert.live We've had to stop doing BC and National Parks as the API changed and we haven't had time to update our end. But Alberta still works!

sequoia 5y ago

Wow, thank you for explaining this!! I was wondering how weekends that were "not yet available for online booking" were already nearly fully booked when I looked on the booking site. Very irritating that people do this... With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and start doing this myself, if that's the price of admission

mikepurvis 5y ago
It's definitely a prisoner's dilemma type of situation— no one wants it to be like that, but once there's a critical mass of people doing it, then you kind of have to. Once everyone does, you're back to square one, except with a system based on unwritten rules that are confusing and exclude the uninitiated. And it's not obvious how to fix it in a way that doesn't screw up the system for someone else: - exorbitant cancellation fees would punish people whose plans change, and a lot of people would just swallow the extra cost anyway. - insisting that the entire timeframe be in scope at time of booking would make it hard or impossible to book longer vacations at popular spots (which at this point is basically anything within 4h of Toronto). - making the whole season available at once would create an ultra high stakes feeding frenzy, with the servers probably ending up crashing. - some kind of bidding or lottery setup would be extra complexity, and would end up rewarding people with the time, money, and schedule flexibility to "play" whatever the system is. I suppose the Ontario Parks mandate is to just maximize utilization, so from their point of view it doesn't really matter as long as weekends are booked solid and at least some proportion of the canceled midweek days end up being scooped up later by retirees or whoever.