App helps find cancellations on B.C. Parks’ reservation site
For unhappy campers who never seem to have luck booking a reservation for their favourite B.C. Parks campsite, Vancouver web-design firm SmashLAB thinks they have something to help.
SmashLAB technical director Eric Shelkie has written a program, which runs through a website, that automatically searches B.C. Parks’ Discover Camping website looking for campsites that come available through cancellation.
And if it finds one that fits a user’s bill, the program notifies him or her by text message. Then it’s up to the user to go ahead and book the site.
They’re calling it Campnab, and launched it Tuesday.
“I was really kind of shocked,” Shelkie said of what he found when he started testing the program. “Even today, in the last 24 hours, I spotted something like 700 new openings. Stuff that was booked yesterday, but opened up today.”
Campnab is an automated equivalent of someone sitting at a computer, watching the Discover Camping website and periodically hitting the “refresh” button to see if anything changes.
And Campnab is a new way of approaching the Discover Camping reservation system, which has had its share of controversy in recent years. B.C. Parks has faced a backlash from campers over the system because it allowed people to book campsites solid months ahead of time, and for not cracking down on people booking sites and flipping them to others for inflated prices.
Last summer, users were incensed when it was discovered tour operators were booking campsites and reselling them to European tourists with big markups.
B.C. Parks made changes this year, reducing the length of stay at popular campgrounds and making reservations non-transferable, to try to clamp down on the problems and make access more fair.
The folks behind Campnab want to avoid any controversy, said Karjaluota. They’re charging fees ($10$20 for a single use or $5-$15 per month for a membership), though Karjaluota said that is just to cover their costs to host Campnab on computer servers.
And they have no intention of developing options for Campnab to book sites for users, which Karjaluota doesn’t think B.C. Parks would allow anyway.
“I would rather not be a social pariah,” Karjaluota said.
In the couple of days that it has been public, Karjaluota said feedback has been generally positive. He put a notice on the Vancouver Reddit thread, which saw some enthusiastic responses.
“I haven’t heard from B.C. Parks,” Karjaluota said. “My hope is they would be cool with it, but you never know.”
Outdoor recreation advocate Sam Waddington hadn’t heard about Campnab, but said the concept sounded like “a neat way to make the (booking) system work.”
And it’s a good thing if Campnab can fill short-notice cancellations and help people find campsites when reservations for campgrounds in the Lower Mainland and Sea to Sky region are booked solid for weeks on end in the summer, Waddington said.
His big concern, though, is that a service like Campnab doesn’t become another “middleman” charging a hefty premium for its program to look for reservations.