HOT TICKET ITEMS
Campsites hard to find for Victoria Day weekend as new reservation system faces its first big test
As the Victoria Day long weekend approaches, B.C. provincial park campsites are hot-ticket items, and reservations near the Lower Mainland are all but impossible to find.
A web search on B.C. Parks reservation service for available campgrounds in the Coast Region turned up just one spot for this weekend: Powell River’s Inland Lake Provincial Park, a six-hour drive from Vancouver.
In spite of changes to the online reservation system to make it more user-friendly, and a modest increase in campsite spaces, B.C. Parks may be a victim of its own popularity.
There’s still a chance you could snag a spot — 45 per cent of B.C. provincial park sites are set aside for non-reserved campers — but booking in advance has become a necessity, not a luxury.
Our province’s green spaces have grabbed a lot of international attention recently — in 2016, Trip Advisor named Stanley Park the top park in the world, and Gwaii Haanas is a UNESCO world-heritage site — but not all that attention is good.
When the story broke last year that international travel agencies were snapping up prime, provincially run campsite reservations and reselling the permits like scalped concert tickets for up to double the original cost, local campers were outraged.
In response, B.C. Environment Minister Mary Polak implemented new rules that went into effect Jan. 2 in order to make the online reservation system, Discover Camping, more fair, and address complaints that locals and the public were being shut out of taxpayer-funded campgrounds.
Polak also pledged to meet the growing demand, with 375 new campsites to be open by spring and summer throughout the province — the first phase of 1,900 new campsites that were announced last November by Premier Christy Clark.
As of today, 345 of those sites have opened, spread among 14 parks, the majority in high-demand areas, including the Kootenays, the Okanagan, the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.
Reservation-system changes launched Jan. 2 included eliminating the former system of a single “opening day” for online campsite reservations. Jan. 2 kicked off the new, three-month “rolling window” of dates, with sites released for booking at 7 a.m., four months in advance of the date campers wish to book. (Reservations for the May long weekend opened in January.)
Restrictions on the transfer of site permits from one person to another were put in place to prevent the reselling of reservations, and limitations were put in place to prevent ‘overbooking,’ where prime spots and peak-time reservations, such as long weekends, were secured though loopholes that gave preference to bulk-booking.
However, NDP MLA-elect George Heyman said it’s still too early to see if the changes will be enough. Tourism operators can still book large blocks of sites and charge customers a higher rate for them, if they book each site under a client’s name. “Allowing tourism companies to book and resell spots is a form of privatization of our publicly funded parks.
“Our tourism industry wants to attract people and there are plenty of privately run campgrounds they could book. It’s not appropriate to shut out B.C. families who have paid tax dollars to support these parks while allowing private operators to profit,” said Heyman.
Chilliwack city Coun. Sam Waddington, who criticized the B.C. Ministry of the Environment’s booking system for provincial parks in 2016, said he’s encouraged by the changes, which he called “meaningful.” But Waddington cautions that problems and challenges remain if B.C. provincial parks are going to keep up with growing regional and international interest.
“The reservation system has been dealt with, but I think we are going to continue to see challenges on the ground. We still have a huge deficit in terms of maintenance dollars and upkeep dollars. Park rangers and recreation staff in the parks are overworked, their jurisdictions are massive and they are completely unable to manage them.”