Big Chages Coming To Reserve America?

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Booz Allen Hamilton is only taking over the Recreation.gov contract from Aspira, not Reserve America. Aspira/Reserve America has separate contracts with each of the many public and private park systems they manage reservations for. 
 
I just hope the APIs don?t make it easy for bots to automatically reserve sites. It is bad enough now trying to get a popular site the instant reservations open up. Imagine how it will be when you can buy an app that will reserve in milliseconds.
 
Well, Reserve America sucks for finding info about the campground and if they have any campsites which are not reservable. 

Forget about finding first come first serve campsites, or info about campsites available before the reservation system starts taking reservations. Most of the time there is little or NO info about these campsites.

Some campgrounds are open early or late in the season, but don't active camp hosts of employees to keep track of the reserved sites.  Also many campgrounds have first come first serve (usually called walk up sites).  Many times on the Reserve America web site these campsites just show an "X" or don't even list the sites.

If all you care about is making a reservations months or weeks in advance, or maybe hoping to grab a recently canceled campsite it works pretty good.
 
nothing good is ever available on RA.

I'm thinking all campgounds should be 1st come 1st served.  Good campground spaces are often reserved months ahead and then advertised for sale.
 
Any reservation service, including RA, is only as good as the information provided to it by the park system management. Some park systems do list walk-up sites, while others do not. That's a park system decision, not RA's.
 
sightseers said:
... I'm thinking all campgounds should be 1st come 1st served. ...
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This might be ok for retirees or those with otherwise open schedules but most of us working stiffs have to plan well in advance and can't show up at 7:00 Friday morning hoping for a site for the weekend.
 
As I see it the problem with the current reservation system is that it encourages over booking.  People book 3 or 4 different campgrounds for some weekend 6 months away and then wait until the cancellation deadline to pick which one they are actually going to go to, if any.
 
Isaac-1 said:
As I see it the problem with the current reservation system is that it encourages over booking.  People book 3 or 4 different campgrounds for some weekend 6 months away and then wait until the cancellation deadline to pick which one they are actually going to go to, if any.
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As long as those people are willing to pay the cancellation fees, I don't know if there's much that can be done about that.
 
Isaac-1 said:
As I see it the problem with the current reservation system is that it encourages over booking.  People book 3 or 4 different campgrounds for some weekend 6 months away and then wait until the cancellation deadline to pick which one they are actually going to go to, if any.
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We use RA a lot and are happy with the results most of the time. I think the penalty for canceling a reservation needs to be on a graduated scale like many private campgrounds. The closer to your check-in date the more you pay. 
 
it's a poor way to get information about the campsites, but it's not a terrible way to get a reservation, and I have found some cool unknown (to me) campgrounds through it.

I'll take a computer based reservation system over driving around from campsite to campsite looking for an open spot because there's no such system.
 
Dutch, the article in the link says:
." In October, a new contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, a management-consulting giant based in northern Virginia, will take over operations from Aspira, the parent company of ReserveAmerica"

Where did you get info that only Recreation.gov would be affected. I read the article several times and didn't get the same understanding. I'm not saying you're wrong. I just like to understand more the relationship between RA and Recreation.gov. 

I used RA a few years ago and didn't like it. I have been using Recreation.gov for COE reservations without any problems.
 
ChasA said:
Dutch, the article in the link says:
." In October, a new contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, a management-consulting giant based in northern Virginia, will take over operations from Aspira, the parent company of ReserveAmerica"

Where did you get info that only Recreation.gov would be affected. I read the article several times and didn't get the same understanding. I'm not saying you're wrong. I just like to understand more the relationship between RA and Recreation.gov. 

I used RA a few years ago and didn't like it. I have been using Recreation.gov for COE reservations without any problems.
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Read the entire article:

"Hooray, you say. Except, wait?state-park campsites aren?t included in this revolution. Sadly, all 241,255 of them remain locked into the old monopoly-hobbled systems. To change that, we?re going to have to get loud."

The state parks are remaining with RA. Recreation.gov is operated by Aspira under a single contract with the US government. It's that contract that is moving to Booz Allen. The Reserve America operation and its many state and private contracts are remaining with Aspira.
 
What they should do is charge your card when you reserve the space with a no cancellation policy ....if you don't show it stays empty.
 
sightseers said:
What they should do is charge your card when you reserve the space with a no cancellation policy ....if you don't show it stays empty.
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When reservations are accepted up to 12 months ahead in some cases, there has to be some reasonable accommodation for future unplanned changes in circumstances. The difficulty comes from trying to balance that accommodation against controlling the folks that multi-book sites, cancelling the unwanted ones at the last minute. That's one reason that Florida has raised their cancellation fee up to $17.75. Apparently NY has less of a problem, and they've held their fee at $9. NY doesn't allow multi-booking sites within the same park though, so that may help. When I reserved two adjoining sites at a NY state park for Labor Day week months ago, I could only reserve one with my account and had to use my daughter's account for the other site, and that's fine with me.
 
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