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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Yeah, likewise. I use the site almost weekly for timed-entry reservations to various trailheads and parks, especially during the Summer and Fall hiking season. Even after adding my national park pass when checking out, which removes the bulk of the reservation fee, there's always a $2 service fee on checkout. It adds up.

Separate frustration: needing a timed-entry permit for everything. It used to be you could wake up, glance at the sky and check the weather and decide where you're going and how far you might want to go. Now you have to hover over the computer days in advance, or refresh at just the right time to book a spot because certain time windows for entry haven't been released on the website yet, and won't be available to book until the day prior at a specific time.

And if the weather is bad on the day, you're probably out of luck for the next few days, and potentially the next week if you didn't think ahead and buy permits for any other days you might want to go.

I gave up on trying to get camping reservations altogether. They were gone within minutes of release.

Regarding timed entry which I hate, this popped up in the pandemic and seem to have never left. Its like all spontaneity is being eliminated in every aspect of outdoor adventures(hikes, camping, etc). I don't really go to natl. parks anymore and have been looking for camping in natl forests and more remote areas where there are few people(but are father away). Maybe the answer is first come first serve for everything? Because whatever is happening now seems to be working for nobody.

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.

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.

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.

Right but if you charge a fee to cancel then you've just made the no-show problem worse. Who would voluntarily pay fee when you can just do... nothing?

That's only true if the fee is greater than the paid cost, but the fee is only 40%. That means people still get back 60% of their money.

To put it another way, they could pay a $40 fee or lose $100 by doing nothing. Most people would rather pay the fee and get their $60 back.

If your goal is to maximize the number of people actually in the park, then you want cheap early cancellations, and high late cancellation and no-show fees. You want to encourage people to cancel with enough warning if they no longer plan to be there.

Not surprisingly, this is also the exact model that hotels use...

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