11 ms·

Suit alleges recreation.gov cluttered with junk fees, seeks millions in refunds

222 points by CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago

uoaei 3y ago
The app is developed and managed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Insiders in the NPS that I've spoken to all have no nice things to say of them, primarily because of bloated contracts, underdelivery, and overruns.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Never let a crisis go to waste. Great opportunity to slot folks from the US Digital Service in to take ownership.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    I don't think the USDS can take ownership unless you tried to claim eminent domain over the software. Not sure how that would work.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      If it was a work commissioned by the US gov, and the contract stipulates they own the codebase, they own it (should be able to FOIA this). If the contract does not transfer ownership, and Booz Allen is getting paid to own and operate the web property, USDS spins up and does a reimplementation (or contributes some technologists to sit with technologists already at that federal agency, I've heard of both operating models during my interviews with USDS). Similar, but not as critical, as what happened with healthcare.gov. I was sloppy with my comment: when I say "take ownership", I meant over providing the service to the public (ie the responsibility), not the code itself. My apologies! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...
solardev 3y ago
As much as this type of corruption sucks... I gotta say recreation.gov is way better than what came before it, with every state and federal system doing their own random thing with terrible UX and horrible performance, and many campsites having no online presence at all. Many places now on recreation.gov used to require you to fax in reservations and wait days for a confirmation, or else just do the drive up and fill out a paper slip thing the morning of (too bad if they're all gone). Sure, it'd be nice to clean up the fees and get more money to the parks themselves, but I gotta give credit to the website for cleaning up what used to be a nightmare and turning it into a pretty streamlined (if slightly more expensive) process. Edit: Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it? Of course it would be better to have actually functional public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to actually be effective at basic services. Is it worse for public dollars to get funneled to a public private partnership with an overhead, that at least delivers a functional product, or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?
- tonymet 3y ago
  at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is more about the lack of governance with the free structure and not abiding by the law about establishing fees . Here's one example from the article Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330 individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz Allen’s arrangement with the federal government, it could pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for the Middle Fork lottery
  - taftster 3y ago
    That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to the park for use and maintenance of the resource. I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.
subsubzero 3y ago
As a somewhat heavy user of recreation.gov this suit really makes me happy. The cancellation fees are borderline insane - ex. a $25 per day camping site fee that needs to be cancelled leads to a $10 fee per day, meaning that the fee is 40% of the initial reservation price.
- suzzer99 3y ago
  I once had to cancel a one night reservation. I was trying to do the right thing to open up the spot for someone else. But the cancellation fee was more than the actual reservation, meaning I would have to pay them to cancel. Ridiculous system.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Cancelation fees should be massive, it deprives use of the land if there's not enough time to find a new user. Our national parks are a limited resource, don't reserve and take away use from someone else if youre not going to use it.
  - dc96 3y ago
    Cancellation fees should not be more than double the actual fee of booking. This highly incentivizes no-shows and the use of virtual credit/debit cards for the initial booking.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      If you don't get the fee for just no showing I definitely agree. But I really do strongly believe that there needs to be heavy disincentives for reserving space that you don't use. The lack of extra space is the whole reason this site was needed in the first place.
      - Brusco_RF 3y ago
atourgates 3y ago
I have no perspective on the legality, but this sounds like a corrupt contract. The details from the article that stand out to me: * The US Government paid nothing for Recreation.gov, and the site is instead funded by fees charged on the platform, that are passed through to the site's operator, Booz Allen * The amount generated by those fees and paid to Booz Allen is not publically disclosed. * There are times when government agencies (like the NPS) offer free tickets (aka, timed entry to popular national parks), and Booz Allen still tacks on a fee. * Similarly, when you enter a nonrefundable lottery for popular permits (climbing Mt. Whitney, rafting the Salmon, etc.) the $6 fee you pay to enter doesn't go to, say, conservation efforts in those areas, but goes straight to Booz Allen. On princple, I don't mind user-fees being attached to some activities in public lands. But this payment structure seems designed to defraud the American public. Certainly, the contractor is providing value by delivering online reservation systems, and that costs money, but they should not be incentivized to charge fees that go to them, not the public lands. I hope the lawsuit succeeds in gaining class action status, and prevents other government websites from being structured this way.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing, and Booz-Allen is one of the top firms in that arena. Their bread and butter is milking federal contracts for every penny they can.
  - dawnerd 3y ago
    Delaware north is another one of these corrupt companies milking taxpayers. They’re not as bad I don’t think but still…
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  I do. If public funds used to acquire public land aren't enough to make it accessible to the public, that's fine. Just seal it off and cart anyone on it off to jail. It shouldn't be a playground for the rich, partially funded by the taxpayer.
  - 3y ago
digdugdirk 3y ago
Out of curiosity - What would be the difficulties in having government services like this be offered as "api-only" from the government's side, and allowing open competition for interfaces and other interaction? What difficulties would there be from the government's perspective, what issues would the companies experience when trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues would pop up for the users of the services?
- lesuorac 3y ago
  You would need to allocate taxes to do that and also taxes on maintenance. This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.
- sh1mmer 3y ago
  I think this is conceptually a great idea, especially for viewing data. However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
- mcmcmc 3y ago
  Because government services have to be accessible to everyone. An API is not “accessible” to most people.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  This site was commissioned in the wake of the obamacare market roll out which was an absolute cluster fuck. The idea was basically "ok so it turns out we're completely incapable of building a website without it falling over once we turn it on, lets let the private sector do it and incentivize them to make it good by letting them charge a fee when people use it". So I guess the difficult is that whoever came up with this website didn't believe the government could deliver it. Also thad the benefit of the site being free in terms of upfront costs.
  - strbean 3y ago
    Well that's a hell of a scam, because contractors built the first rendition of HealthCare.gov that failed miserably: > Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(
tonymet 3y ago
There's a huge need for real investigative journalism into corruption like this. Kudos to the plaintiffs for exposing the grift. recreation.gov has some benefits – they've improved usability. The fees are punitive and obscure. Also there's lots of corruption and scalping on the site that they are not taking responsibility for.
- pistolpete333 3y ago
  You should check out Matt Stoller and the work he is doing to call out this kind of monopolization/corruption/regulatory failure across industries. His articles are extremely informative, eye opening and generally non-partisan in their analysis. He wrote an article calling out this situation with recreation.gov about a year ago https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
  - tonymet 3y ago
    you’re right this was very i formative
xrd 3y ago
This reminds me of Oracle managing the health care site for Oregon. I remember when a bunch of us in the open source community were trying to avoid Oracle getting this contract: https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/ https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/ But, Oracle got it anyway. Imagine if the dozens of Perl programmers had $240M and had recycled all that money back into the local economy. Could it have gone any worse even if that exchange was rewritten in Perl 6?
tyingq 3y ago
This is pretty rampant across all levels of government. A couple of examples: - Several states/counties/cities/etc add a surcharge for credit card payments or transaction/processing fees for things like vehicle registration, paying traffic tickets, obtaining court records, paying property tax, etc. - Prisons and jails are really terrible with junk fees for both the prisoners and for systems set up for their friends/families to call or message them, send them food/sundries, etc. They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system.
- russdill 3y ago
  I fail to see how passing on a credit card processing fee is rampant corruption.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    When the fee is clearly higher than what it's costing them. Either by the percentage itself, or often, a "minimum fee amount" that really exceeds the actual cost. A $2 minimum charge, for example, is somewhat common for things where the item/service is often much less than $100.
  - GuardianCaveman 3y ago
    In one of the linked articles it shows one campsite who charged 5 dollars for a reservation but BAH was charging the campsite 6-8 dollars for the reservation. So they raised their prices to cover the more than 100% fee that the campsite had to pay for a service they used to offer for no extra charge to an organization they were forced to enter into by the state. Then BAH won’t disclose anything about the fees and contract so we have a black box of a contract making god knows how much money in a monopoly. You could say well I don’t know how Ticketmaster absorbing all competitors and becoming a defacto monopoly and charging 30% fees to the buyer and 30% fees to the booker and is rampant corruption since they’re just passing on credit card processing fees.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  > They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system. Sounds like the meal plan at my kid's college. Unsurprising that they pattern their systems after those used to manage prisoners?
coding123 3y ago
Bigger problem is no-shows
lacker 3y ago
The price of everything on recreation.gov is already so cheap, honestly I don't care about their fees. It's like, ten bucks in fees for staying a night somewhere in the San Francisco area. Far, far lower than Airbnb fees. The problem that most bugs me is how often reservations for popular campsites fill up the moment they become available. And then when you go camping, there are often empty sites. It's so cheap to reserve campsites, and you have to do it so far in advance, people reserve campsites they aren't sure they want, cancel their plans later, and don't even bother to inform the campgrounds.
- GuardianCaveman 3y ago
  Pinnacles park is like 60 dollars a night. I bet I could get a hotel nearby for cheaper. It doesn’t scale either for the season. I went to camp at a lake and recreation charged around 50 and the campsite was 20% full.
  - lacker 3y ago
    Cheapest motel in Soledad (near Pinnacles) looks like $110 a night right now. Plus there is a lot more demand for a campsite in Pinnacles than for a hotel room along the 101. I think the real value of that Pinnacles campsite is more like $200 a night. Depending on the time of year, of course. Pinnacles is not too bad a divergence, though - worse is Point Reyes, where a campsite costs $30 a night, but it's very close to San Francisco, and a hotel room would certainly cost hundreds of dollars a night. And Point Reyes is terrible for people reserving spots that they don't end up using.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  Meanwhile outside of San Francisco, reserving a $10 night at a campground will add a $8 fee on top. That makes no sense.
refurb 3y ago
Wait, we're allowed to sue business who have junk fees?
honkycat 3y ago
I would love to go camping. I have some friends who are going over the 4th of July weekend. I was like: "WOW! How did you get a camp site??" "Oh, we reserved it... in December" Fucking WILD that these camp sites are selling out like miley cyrus tickets. Really annoying!
metafour 3y ago
Anyone have access to Pacer and can get us the filings since this article was written? Virginia Eastern District Court Case # 1:23-cv-00043 I’m not familiar with any ways to get free access https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_al_v_Booz_Allen_Hamilton,_Inc https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_...
- 83 3y ago
  Pacer charges per page, but if you keep it under $30 in a quarter the bill is forgiven (so free). You'll eat up 300 pages pretty quickly - there's roughly 20 filings between now and March 10 which I'm guessing is around when this article came out, probably too many pages to fit under the free limit but then again a lot of the activity isn't very interesting.
- thekrendal 3y ago
  It looks like some of it is available via RECAP, which can be found here. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66718284/wilson-v-booz-allen-hamilton-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66718284/wilson-v-booz-... Beyond that as another poster noted, you'd have to buy the additional files via PACER.
throwaway14356 3y ago
You could make the lottery tickets cheaper if you buy early and create a marketplace where you can sell or auction you tickets or winnings. Then they could take a percentage of that and ramp up prices to chase the market.
- havnagiggle 3y ago
  This reminds me of one of the first freelance jobs I was designing a bid for. It was described as a kind of profit sharing app for sports betting. This was ~2014. After a brief conversation with the possible client to get actual requirements, it turns out they were wanting to group together people to win the perfect NCAA bracket for $1 billion. I had a big laugh and tried to show them the numbers quickly. Who knows, maybe they found another scam to sell to people.
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    sounds very next level, lets legally sandbox such things with a 3rd party app platform with 1000 usd developer fees and 30% on sales and ingame purchases. Then have a dedicated advertisement product. walk in the park
Dowwie 3y ago
Who are these seven outdoor enthusiasts leading the way?

222 points by CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago

The app is developed and managed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Insiders in the NPS that I've spoken to all have no nice things to say of them, primarily because of bloated contracts, underdelivery, and overruns.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Never let a crisis go to waste. Great opportunity to slot folks from the US Digital Service in to take ownership.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  I don't think the USDS can take ownership unless you tried to claim eminent domain over the software. Not sure how that would work.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    If it was a work commissioned by the US gov, and the contract stipulates they own the codebase, they own it (should be able to FOIA this). If the contract does not transfer ownership, and Booz Allen is getting paid to own and operate the web property, USDS spins up and does a reimplementation (or contributes some technologists to sit with technologists already at that federal agency, I've heard of both operating models during my interviews with USDS). Similar, but not as critical, as what happened with healthcare.gov. I was sloppy with my comment: when I say "take ownership", I meant over providing the service to the public (ie the responsibility), not the code itself. My apologies! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...

solardev 3y ago

As much as this type of corruption sucks... I gotta say recreation.gov is way better than what came before it, with every state and federal system doing their own random thing with terrible UX and horrible performance, and many campsites having no online presence at all. Many places now on recreation.gov used to require you to fax in reservations and wait days for a confirmation, or else just do the drive up and fill out a paper slip thing the morning of (too bad if they're all gone). Sure, it'd be nice to clean up the fees and get more money to the parks themselves, but I gotta give credit to the website for cleaning up what used to be a nightmare and turning it into a pretty streamlined (if slightly more expensive) process. Edit: Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it? Of course it would be better to have actually functional public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to actually be effective at basic services. Is it worse for public dollars to get funneled to a public private partnership with an overhead, that at least delivers a functional product, or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?

tonymet 3y ago
at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is more about the lack of governance with the free structure and not abiding by the law about establishing fees . Here's one example from the article Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330 individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz Allen’s arrangement with the federal government, it could pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for the Middle Fork lottery
- taftster 3y ago
  That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to the park for use and maintenance of the resource. I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.

subsubzero 3y ago

As a somewhat heavy user of recreation.gov this suit really makes me happy. The cancellation fees are borderline insane - ex. a $25 per day camping site fee that needs to be cancelled leads to a $10 fee per day, meaning that the fee is 40% of the initial reservation price.

suzzer99 3y ago
I once had to cancel a one night reservation. I was trying to do the right thing to open up the spot for someone else. But the cancellation fee was more than the actual reservation, meaning I would have to pay them to cancel. Ridiculous system.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Cancelation fees should be massive, it deprives use of the land if there's not enough time to find a new user. Our national parks are a limited resource, don't reserve and take away use from someone else if youre not going to use it.
- dc96 3y ago
  Cancellation fees should not be more than double the actual fee of booking. This highly incentivizes no-shows and the use of virtual credit/debit cards for the initial booking.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    If you don't get the fee for just no showing I definitely agree. But I really do strongly believe that there needs to be heavy disincentives for reserving space that you don't use. The lack of extra space is the whole reason this site was needed in the first place.
    - Brusco_RF 3y ago

atourgates 3y ago

I have no perspective on the legality, but this sounds like a corrupt contract. The details from the article that stand out to me: * The US Government paid nothing for Recreation.gov, and the site is instead funded by fees charged on the platform, that are passed through to the site's operator, Booz Allen * The amount generated by those fees and paid to Booz Allen is not publically disclosed. * There are times when government agencies (like the NPS) offer free tickets (aka, timed entry to popular national parks), and Booz Allen still tacks on a fee. * Similarly, when you enter a nonrefundable lottery for popular permits (climbing Mt. Whitney, rafting the Salmon, etc.) the $6 fee you pay to enter doesn't go to, say, conservation efforts in those areas, but goes straight to Booz Allen. On princple, I don't mind user-fees being attached to some activities in public lands. But this payment structure seems designed to defraud the American public. Certainly, the contractor is providing value by delivering online reservation systems, and that costs money, but they should not be incentivized to charge fees that go to them, not the public lands. I hope the lawsuit succeeds in gaining class action status, and prevents other government websites from being structured this way.

SoftTalker 3y ago
They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing, and Booz-Allen is one of the top firms in that arena. Their bread and butter is milking federal contracts for every penny they can.
- dawnerd 3y ago
  Delaware north is another one of these corrupt companies milking taxpayers. They’re not as bad I don’t think but still…
sidewndr46 3y ago
I do. If public funds used to acquire public land aren't enough to make it accessible to the public, that's fine. Just seal it off and cart anyone on it off to jail. It shouldn't be a playground for the rich, partially funded by the taxpayer.
- 3y ago

digdugdirk 3y ago

Out of curiosity - What would be the difficulties in having government services like this be offered as "api-only" from the government's side, and allowing open competition for interfaces and other interaction? What difficulties would there be from the government's perspective, what issues would the companies experience when trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues would pop up for the users of the services?

lesuorac 3y ago
You would need to allocate taxes to do that and also taxes on maintenance. This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.
sh1mmer 3y ago
I think this is conceptually a great idea, especially for viewing data. However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
mcmcmc 3y ago
Because government services have to be accessible to everyone. An API is not “accessible” to most people.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
This site was commissioned in the wake of the obamacare market roll out which was an absolute cluster fuck. The idea was basically "ok so it turns out we're completely incapable of building a website without it falling over once we turn it on, lets let the private sector do it and incentivize them to make it good by letting them charge a fee when people use it". So I guess the difficult is that whoever came up with this website didn't believe the government could deliver it. Also thad the benefit of the site being free in terms of upfront costs.
- strbean 3y ago
  Well that's a hell of a scam, because contractors built the first rendition of HealthCare.gov that failed miserably: > Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(

tonymet 3y ago

There's a huge need for real investigative journalism into corruption like this. Kudos to the plaintiffs for exposing the grift. recreation.gov has some benefits – they've improved usability. The fees are punitive and obscure. Also there's lots of corruption and scalping on the site that they are not taking responsibility for.

pistolpete333 3y ago
You should check out Matt Stoller and the work he is doing to call out this kind of monopolization/corruption/regulatory failure across industries. His articles are extremely informative, eye opening and generally non-partisan in their analysis. He wrote an article calling out this situation with recreation.gov about a year ago https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
- tonymet 3y ago
  you’re right this was very i formative

xrd 3y ago

This reminds me of Oracle managing the health care site for Oregon. I remember when a bunch of us in the open source community were trying to avoid Oracle getting this contract: https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/ https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/ But, Oracle got it anyway. Imagine if the dozens of Perl programmers had $240M and had recycled all that money back into the local economy. Could it have gone any worse even if that exchange was rewritten in Perl 6?

tyingq 3y ago

This is pretty rampant across all levels of government. A couple of examples: - Several states/counties/cities/etc add a surcharge for credit card payments or transaction/processing fees for things like vehicle registration, paying traffic tickets, obtaining court records, paying property tax, etc. - Prisons and jails are really terrible with junk fees for both the prisoners and for systems set up for their friends/families to call or message them, send them food/sundries, etc. They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system.

russdill 3y ago
I fail to see how passing on a credit card processing fee is rampant corruption.
- tyingq 3y ago
  When the fee is clearly higher than what it's costing them. Either by the percentage itself, or often, a "minimum fee amount" that really exceeds the actual cost. A $2 minimum charge, for example, is somewhat common for things where the item/service is often much less than $100.
- GuardianCaveman 3y ago
  In one of the linked articles it shows one campsite who charged 5 dollars for a reservation but BAH was charging the campsite 6-8 dollars for the reservation. So they raised their prices to cover the more than 100% fee that the campsite had to pay for a service they used to offer for no extra charge to an organization they were forced to enter into by the state. Then BAH won’t disclose anything about the fees and contract so we have a black box of a contract making god knows how much money in a monopoly. You could say well I don’t know how Ticketmaster absorbing all competitors and becoming a defacto monopoly and charging 30% fees to the buyer and 30% fees to the booker and is rampant corruption since they’re just passing on credit card processing fees.
SoftTalker 3y ago
> They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system. Sounds like the meal plan at my kid's college. Unsurprising that they pattern their systems after those used to manage prisoners?

coding123 3y ago

Bigger problem is no-shows

lacker 3y ago

The price of everything on recreation.gov is already so cheap, honestly I don't care about their fees. It's like, ten bucks in fees for staying a night somewhere in the San Francisco area. Far, far lower than Airbnb fees. The problem that most bugs me is how often reservations for popular campsites fill up the moment they become available. And then when you go camping, there are often empty sites. It's so cheap to reserve campsites, and you have to do it so far in advance, people reserve campsites they aren't sure they want, cancel their plans later, and don't even bother to inform the campgrounds.

GuardianCaveman 3y ago
Pinnacles park is like 60 dollars a night. I bet I could get a hotel nearby for cheaper. It doesn’t scale either for the season. I went to camp at a lake and recreation charged around 50 and the campsite was 20% full.
- lacker 3y ago
  Cheapest motel in Soledad (near Pinnacles) looks like $110 a night right now. Plus there is a lot more demand for a campsite in Pinnacles than for a hotel room along the 101. I think the real value of that Pinnacles campsite is more like $200 a night. Depending on the time of year, of course. Pinnacles is not too bad a divergence, though - worse is Point Reyes, where a campsite costs $30 a night, but it's very close to San Francisco, and a hotel room would certainly cost hundreds of dollars a night. And Point Reyes is terrible for people reserving spots that they don't end up using.
yencabulator 3y ago
Meanwhile outside of San Francisco, reserving a $10 night at a campground will add a $8 fee on top. That makes no sense.

refurb 3y ago

Wait, we're allowed to sue business who have junk fees?

honkycat 3y ago

I would love to go camping. I have some friends who are going over the 4th of July weekend. I was like: "WOW! How did you get a camp site??" "Oh, we reserved it... in December" Fucking WILD that these camp sites are selling out like miley cyrus tickets. Really annoying!

metafour 3y ago

Anyone have access to Pacer and can get us the filings since this article was written? Virginia Eastern District Court Case # 1:23-cv-00043 I’m not familiar with any ways to get free access https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_al_v_Booz_Allen_Hamilton,_Inc https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_...

83 3y ago
Pacer charges per page, but if you keep it under $30 in a quarter the bill is forgiven (so free). You'll eat up 300 pages pretty quickly - there's roughly 20 filings between now and March 10 which I'm guessing is around when this article came out, probably too many pages to fit under the free limit but then again a lot of the activity isn't very interesting.
thekrendal 3y ago
It looks like some of it is available via RECAP, which can be found here. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66718284/wilson-v-booz-allen-hamilton-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66718284/wilson-v-booz-... Beyond that as another poster noted, you'd have to buy the additional files via PACER.

throwaway14356 3y ago

You could make the lottery tickets cheaper if you buy early and create a marketplace where you can sell or auction you tickets or winnings. Then they could take a percentage of that and ramp up prices to chase the market.

havnagiggle 3y ago
This reminds me of one of the first freelance jobs I was designing a bid for. It was described as a kind of profit sharing app for sports betting. This was ~2014. After a brief conversation with the possible client to get actual requirements, it turns out they were wanting to group together people to win the perfect NCAA bracket for $1 billion. I had a big laugh and tried to show them the numbers quickly. Who knows, maybe they found another scam to sell to people.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  sounds very next level, lets legally sandbox such things with a 3rd party app platform with 1000 usd developer fees and 30% on sales and ingame purchases. Then have a dedicated advertisement product. walk in the park

Dowwie 3y ago

Who are these seven outdoor enthusiasts leading the way?