Recreation.gov: How To Fix Our Broken Reservation System
The government’s campground and cabin reservation system needs a makeover.
Nov 20, 2024
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From Arches and Acadia national parks to the dustiest of our BLM land, one rule permeates nearly all of our federal public lands: You can stay in one campsite for a maximum of 14 days in a 28-day timeframe. This is true whether you’re dispersed camping off a remote Forest Service road or reserving a highly maintained campsite in Zion. For campsites that you reserve in advance, this means you can log on to Recreation.gov and book up to 14 consecutive days at one campsite. Down the line, if you want to shorten your trip, you can do so with no penalty.
This sounds nice in some ways, but it encourages mindsets of scarcity, competition, and hoarding. It creates a sort of game out of campsite reservations: Log on at the first possible second and reserve your spot six months out, just in case. No matter if you end up staying only three days of your 14-day reservation—there’s nothing to lose so long as you secure the spot...
In addition to the reservation rules, Recreation.gov’s cancellation policies incentivize bad behavior, leading to no-shows and empty spots. Currently, if a campsite is canceled multiple days in advance, the user gets charged a $10 cancellation fee and loses a non-refundable reservation fee. To use a real-life example, I booked a site in Colorado for a couple of nights this year to camp and mountain bike, and the cost was $20 per day plus an $8 reservation fee. If I cancel this reservation two days in advance or more, I lose $18 of my $48 total cost, or nearly 40%.
Sometimes, life (or weather) happens, and you need to cancel the day before your trip. According to the current policy, you lose the same as above—plus your first night’s fees. Using the same two-night weekend camping trip example, I would get back a measly $10 of my original $48 reservation by canceling the day before. In these situations, there’s relatively little to lose if you just don’t show up. And too often, that’s what happens. Humans are busy with work and life, and it’s often easier to just abandon ship, stay home, and don’t change your reservation online. As a whole, these policies hardly incentivize cancellation and further contribute to no-shows and empty spots that otherwise could otherwise be filled with happy campers.
The real question we collectively need to ask ourselves is: If we limit camping on federal land, how many days is the right number for one party? Let’s be real: 14 days is an extremely long time to spend in one campsite. This is more than a visit—you are setting up shop for the long haul. Even at a leisurely pace, two weeks spent in one spot reaches well beyond the purposes of simply experiencing a natural area. For our highest-volume public lands, this 14-day policy is antiquated and simply too long.
This policy is the cause one of the odd realities of our busiest parks. Despite full reservations online, many of our most spectacular campgrounds are too often deserted. To provide a real-life example, on a recent swing through Southern Utah in April, we pulled into Devils Garden Campground in Arches National Park. This is the only campground inside the park boundaries, with 51 sites overall. Getting a spot inside can be an extraordinary experience: you will enjoy unobstructed views of the sunset and sunrise, not be in a rush, and get to the hikes early before the crowds and midday heat. We noted a “Campground Full” sign at the entrance, but we politely inquired with the ranger on duty and were given one of the many reserved but unused sites.
We got lucky, and we had a spectacular stay. But camping in national parks and other public lands shouldn’t come down to luck. Possible fixes are intuitive and easy to achieve.
Five consecutive nights at one national park campsite should be the top end for everyone’s collective benefit. We’d all love to stay as long as possible in these beautiful places, but five full days is a healthy chunk of time to get comfortable, hike the areas, explore the park, take in the sunsets and sunrises, and properly unwind. There are certainly arguments to be made for even shorter stay limits in the most popular parks and during peak seasons, and four or even three nights could be the right amount to meet our current demand. But let’s stick with a five-night maximum as a still-generous, but much more practical, amount of time for people to enjoy a site. And remember: This maximum is just for one campsite; as a camper, you could still go to sites in other areas to make for a longer stay.
We acknowledge this hurts some parties. For example, on that trip to Arches, I overheard two very nice retired couples across the road who were spending the full 14 nights at their respective sites. They were wintering all over Utah. This does sound like an exceptional way to live. But it also limits access for everyone else. So even parties like these couples could relatively easily still spend their winters enjoying the desert sun; they just wouldn’t be quite as planted in one place as they’re able to be under the current policy. All things considered, this five-night maximum in our most popular campgrounds is best for us all. Everybody wins, except for maybe these 14-day campers, although we think they’ll be just fine.
To alleviate the issue of no-shows and empty spots, let’s flip the script and incentivize cancellations. Money talks, and a primary reason people aren’t canceling and thereby leaving campsites open is because they are not properly incentivized to do so. To rehash, for a one-night trip that is not canceled two days before arrival or more, you get nothing back, so it’s entirely on the honor system to do the right thing. On a two-night trip under the same circumstances, you get back a small fraction of your initial booking price, and so on.
We propose refunding the entire booking amount—including the registration fee—for cancellations up to noon on the day of arrival. This would allow people to make their last-minute decisions, cancel, get their money back, and open up the spots for other people. (Recreation.gov now has an open campsites alert system, which is great—but requires people to actually cancel.)
On the flipside, one could argue that removing cancellation fees could encourage more people to book up multiple days without the intent to go, thereby not solving the problem or even exacerbating it. We would love to see some data from Recreation.gov but tend to believe that these “superusers” represent a tiny number of outdoor recreationists (it would take a whole lot of effort to make all of those bookings happen). Plus, these folks might do the same thing with or without being able to recoup these fees.
To both include a financial penalty for canceling while maintaining an incentive to cancel—particularly for shorter trips—you could charge just a $10 cancellation fee. That’s enough to provide a bit of sting for canceling and help avoid the mass booking problem mentioned above.
With full refunds up to noon on the day, there are other ways to avoid the mass bookings problem. You could have a maximum number of total bookings in one area or on Recreation.gov, or you could just utilize all of the fancy technology and AI we have these days to flag inappropriate behavior (mass booking and mass cancellations) and cancel those attempted reservations as many companies do in the private sector. That small subgroup of people trying to abuse the rules should not be a hurdle to improving the booking system for us all.
Right now, part of the solution is already in place. At staffed campgrounds, Recreation.gov states that a $20 no-show fee may be imposed if a reservation is not canceled and you do not show up by check-out time on the day after the scheduled arrival date. However, we’ve heard directly from rangers that this often goes unenforced. This makes clear that the current policy just isn’t working to deter bad behavior.
We propose increasing the no-show fee for National Parks and other popular, staffed campgrounds from $20 to $40, and enforcing it. On one end, you get the entirety of your money back if you cancel by noon on the day of your expected arrival, and you pay a $40 fee if you don’t cancel or show up by the next day. With that framework, we would have reasonable financial incentives on both sides for people to cancel, resulting in fewer empty spots at the country’s most busy and beautiful campgrounds.
We would also like to incorporate a repeat offender no-show policy to further incentivize cancellations. For this, let’s borrow from what the state of Wyoming already has in place and adjust a little: For your first three no-shows, you get hit with the $40 fee above. If it happens again, you get a two-year suspension of reservation privileges. This is a pretty serious policy, but one that lets people know they must cancel instead of simply not showing up.
Now, there may be a big outcry among some folks camping on BLM land, national forests, outside of wilderness areas (wilderness is non-motorized—so backpackers only), and other areas that generally receive less pressure (you can learn more about Public Lands Types here). Why have a five-day camping maximum when availability isn’t the issue in these places?
Good policy has flexibility and nuance, and we are all for keeping the 14-day rule intact for areas outside of national parks and popular USFS campgrounds. In reality, these lower-use areas make up the vast majority of our public lands and campsites but receive a fraction of annual park visitors. Lumping these public land types and campgrounds together into one bucket doesn’t do justice to any of them.
As author Edward Abbey once wrote, "A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most non-privileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter." Car camping isn’t exactly the wilderness, but the spirit of this quote is spot on. Let’s regulate what needs to be regulated for the common good and leave whatever we can as untouched and inexpensive as possible.
If you look at Reddit and other online forums, people are screaming to the high heavens, “Let’s just go back to first come, first served and everything will be solved!” The truth is that this probably would eliminate empty spots, and our popular campgrounds would be full just about every night. But it’s also an untenable logistical nightmare at these remote locations. We’ve experienced this in real life: Back before Yosemite’s Camp 4 was under a Recreation.gov reservation system, we were forced to sleep on the side of the road for a couple of hours, only to hop in a long line at 2:30 in the morning and hope for the best at daybreak. Hordes of people with no certainty of getting a spot showed up. Many popular campgrounds are far removed from civilization, and you unfortunately just can’t have the masses driving up in the late afternoon or evening and believing they will a site when they likely won’t. This creates issues with space, crowding, lines, trash, and sleeping areas. First come, first served works great for lower-use areas outside of national parks, but not when the demand far exceeds the supply.
In addition to the fixes above, it would be quite easy to hone in a camping reservation system that further benefits everyone looking to enjoy our parks and wild spaces. Here are some quick examples, just for fun:
Let’s say you are one of those rare people who utilizes the 14 consecutive days at one campsite and don’t want the rule to be stricken entirely. The booking system on Recreation.gov could designate, say, 25 percent of campsites at a particular campground as eligible for 14-day stays. It could designate the next 50 percent of campsites as eligible for five-day stays (what we think is most reasonable given all of the circumstances) and the remaining 25 percent for three-day stays, thereby freeing up more spots. Right now, the 14-day rule is pretty much universal across public land types, thereby ignoring the real-world differences in demand, but even this basic adjustment to the system would allow for a variety of stay durations that better accommodate demand while still allowing for some longer stays.
To take it a step further—and we could have a whole coffee-fueled brainstorming session on this—Recreation.gov could incorporate a more data-centric approach, much like an airline does with modern seat pricing (although, here, we would be talking stay duration instead of pricing). In a place like Arches National Park, which has super high demand along with a dearth of campsites (one campground in the park with 51 total sites), you could adjust the maximum stay to better accommodate the balance of supply and demand. In the peak season and on weekends, it could be a three-day maximum. Perhaps that relaxes to more days during shoulder seasons and weekdays as demand decreases. You could also have the most visited and highest-demand parks pegged with the shortest maximum stays, and less visited parks and campgrounds could adjust their maximum stays up accordingly.
Positive improvements have been made. For many years, users searching for last-minute campsites had to rely on old-school methods of logging into Recreation.gov over and over again, hoping to randomly hit the cancellation jackpot, or they used third-party apps like Campnab. But as of the summer of 2023, Recreation.gov launched its own alerts system that works great. When searching a campground, you can click on the availability alert button, fill out your desired arrival date and duration of stay (or “my start date is flexible +/- 3 days”), and you’ll get an availability email if and when a campsite opens up. We’d like to see push notifications added to the mix instead of just email, but this is a nice, modern touch that helps fill empty sites. Bravo.
It’s hard to imagine that in 2025, we still have a one-size-fits-all approach to campgrounds that covers all public land types, from the busiest national parks to remote BLM land. Moreover, while the spirit of the 14-day rule is admirable, it’s too long for high-use campgrounds, current cancellation policies offer little incentive to cancel, and booking loopholes lead to abuse that gunks up the system for everyone. Above, we laid out practical fixes that still allow for proper enjoyment and recreation while addressing the issues that are creating the problems in the first place. As agencies continue to adapt to the influx of visitors on public land, we’ll keep you up to date on how the booking process changes and unfolds.
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