Recreation.gov can be frustrating...or help lead you to your next adventure.

Through the wizardry of the Internet and computer software, your ability to reserve one of more than 100,000 campsites, cabins, or even fire lookouts that are no longer used as fire lookouts is just a click away. Or so you hope.

Indeed, if you like to vacation on the public lands empire you more than likely have had at least one less than satisfactory experience with recreation.gov, the portal for reservations across the National Park System, the U.S. Forest system, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and other public lands locations.

You've decided when you want to visit your favorite national park campground, and even which campsite you want. You've seated yourself at your computer minutes before 10 a.m. Eastern when the reservation window opens so you can grab what appears to be an available site on recreation.gov. Less than two seconds after 10 a.m., you've click to reserve the site.

... And then you've gnashed your teeth when you get a message that the site has already been reserved.

It's a frustrating, but not entirely uncommon, experience these days. As wonderful as recreation.gov appears at first glance, the system has its foibles.

"We do see recurring complaints about how the system is overrun by bots," said Rick DeLappe, a Park Service employee who manages recreation.gov for the federal land management agencies that use the site for everything from reserving front country and backcountry campsites to tickets for scaling Half Dome at Yosemite National Park or going underground at Mammoth Cave National Park.

"We have a very active security team," DeLappe continued. "We have eyes on the screen watching for suspicious activity. We’ve incorporated the CAPTCHA features for making reservations. There are algorithms that they use to recognize people who may have built a bot or something to improve their access. We’ve got an extensive security plan to protect against this and all the other factors of security that you would think of for protecting private information.”

But more than a few people who use the site believe it's been taken over by bots or some other nefarious blueprint for dominating the reservations platform.

"I am so sick of trying to plan trips and make reservations in our national parks!!! It is a totally ridiculous situation," Rick Leroux wrote in a comment to a Traveler story back in January 2020. "They spend paragraph after paragraph describing the parks and all that you can do, but good luck when it comes to making an actual reservation."

More recently, on February 12 of this year, "rb2" vented his/her irritation with the reservation site in another Traveler comment:

"This is a totally frustrating situation. I have tried for weeks to reserve at spot at Many Glacier in Glacier. I've hit 'Book' a second before the time, two seconds before, right at that the time, and all the available campsites are reserved within five seconds, and there could be up to 20 available."

"I'm done with this reservation system and national parks," Rick Weber added in a comment on February 21. "Only the federal government could screw this up so bad with a multi-million dollar contract. I do not make the foregoing statement without cause. ...You see, I'm a federal employee. I'm rather convinced that savy PC hackers have a backdoor into the system."

Some History About Recreation.Gov

The rumor that recreation.gov was run by a Canadian company carries some truth. 

"It started off in the garage in Ontario by a couple of guys, called ParkNet, then Reserve America,” DeLappe explained last week during a conference call that included Janelle Smith, a Forest Service public affairs specialist who works with DeLappe. "They were housed in Canada, but their office of record was in Saratoga Springs, New York. Over the years, they were purchased by TicketMaster, and then they were part of the Interactive Corp. for a while. Like Hotels.com, that group. And then they were later purchased by the Active Network."

In 2015, the land-management agencies sought a new contractor to build a new reservations system and operate it. The winner in the bidding process was Booz Allen Hamilton, which Outside Magazine once described as a "management consultant giant..."

Once the contract -- $182 million for ten years -- was signed, Booz Allen Hamilton built recreation.gov's online presence, a security system for it, handled the marketing, and subcontracted call center services.

"If you go online to make a reservation right now, their system is what’s allowing you to see what’s available, allowing you to select your days and so forth," DeLappe said. "Your payment actually goes through their system, through their secure system, and then into a Treasury account. So the finances are all handled by the government.”

The revenues pay Booz Allen Hamilton's monthly invoices to the government with the rest returning to the respective land-management agencies where the campsites and other reservable services are located.

About Those Bot Theories

We're overrun by "bots" -- programmable software applications -- that thrive on the Internet, coursing across websites and maybe even your computer to collect information for good, and not so good, purposes. More than a few users of recreation.gov have over the years complained that bots must be the reason it can be difficult, or seemingly impossible, to reserve a campsite when you want to reserve one.

But that's not the case, both DeLappe and Smith say.

“We always learn of new ways that people can game the system," said DeLappe. "I remember a number of years back there was quite a bit of traffic about people buying Yosemite campsites and reselling them on Craig’s List. And so whatever pops up, we go after it in whatever way is available. During that one it was very tough because current regulations, not policy, but regulations, didn’t support us taking some very proactive actions against that.

"But when it comes to all the different kinds of bots, there’s a new one every day. I think everyone in software knows that, and as soon as you build something to protect against it they will come back and fix it.”

A Trip Builder feature on recreation.gov helps you find new destinations. Click the photo and try it/recreation.gov

For the majority of campsites in the system, reservations can be made six months prior to your desired visit. That, too, contributes to the difficulty in landing your preferred reservation, she said.

If you were able to grab a site six months out, you could also extend your stay beyond that six-month window. In other words, someone could reserve a site today, March 3, for September 3. With that reservation in hand, they also could extend their stay up to two weeks in some places. So if you looked at the booking window today, March 3, for September 4, you would see that the site is not yet available; you might think it would be available tomorrow, March 4. But when you log into the system March 4, you might see that the site already has been reserved, by that person who reserved a site on March 3 and extended their stay for a number of days.

"It’s not that somebody had beat them to it that day in that moment,” said Smith.

But, said DeLappe, "(T)here was a problem there. People would book out into the future, and then before that reservation was done and before it became available to everyone else, they would change it and scoot it down the road two more weeks. And they would keep doing this until they got the exact dates that they wanted."

To end that behavior, the booking window was tweaked.

“Basically, if you book out into that window as we’ve described, you cannot change or cancel that reservation until it has become available to the public for at least four days," he said. "Say I booked through the 25th. I was leaving on the 25th, so that site should be becoming open on the 25th. I can’t really change it for seven days. And that means that I can’t scoot it, and everyone else will have fair access to that on the morning of the 25th.”

And there certainly are a lot of people hoping to grab those sites when they do surface. Covied-19 drove crowds of people to the public lands last year, many of them newcomers to national parks and forests and BLM landscapes. And many of those folks also logged onto recreation.gov to find a place to pitch their tents or park their RVs. New recreation.gov accounts last year -- more than 2 million -- represented a 45 percent increase over 2019, said Smith (who long has been dogged in her attempts to land a campsite at Redfish Lake in the Sawtooth NRA in Idaho).

"At the end of FY20, we had 16.4 million user accounts, vs. 14.3 million at the end of FY19," she pointed out.

Yellowstone's Mammoth, Slough Creek, and part of Pebble Creek campgrounds are being added to recreation.gov this month/NPS file

Getting The Most From Recreation.Gov

The solution to booking woes could be to build more campgrounds. Don't expect that to happen overnight. However, all is not hopeless, say DeLappe and Smith.

While booking six months in advance long has been the standard approach, those behind recreation.gov now allow campground managers to play around with booking windows.

"What we found is that a lot of people still prefer first-come, first-serve, they aren’t thinking about camping six months from now. They’re thinking about it the week before or whatever," said DeLappe. "So we changed our system to support variable booking windows."

At Zion National Park in Utah, campground managers last year utilized a 14-day advance booking window.

"Anecdotally, what I heard was that the locals were very happy about it, because they could think about going camping the week after next, instead of six months from now," he said. "That’s just one thing that we’re trying to give them tools to manage their campgrounds as they best see fit."

Implementing a lottery system, as some have suggested, is not as easy as it sounds.

"It’s one thing to say we’re going to run a lottery for, say, a permit on Half Dome, because it’s one permit for one person. If you win the lottery, that’s what you get. A distinct piece of inventory," explained DeLappe. "In a campground, you have all kinds of variables. Do you just want any site in this campground, or are you looking for a specific site? What are your dates? What if all of your dates aren’t available, maybe one night is not available. Can we split that up? It introduces a lot of complexities. So, we are right now looking at options for how you could run a lottery and fill up a campground, but in a fair way and not create a confusing user interface.”

With such heavy demand, usually falling during the summer months, Smith suggested travelers look to the shoulder season when competition for sites isn't so great, or look for mid-week arrivals, which are less popular than weekends. She also urges account holders to take advantage of the "Trip Builder" service on recreation.gov.

"You can plan a route, and then what it does, you can set anywhere from ten to 50 miles from the path that you’re taking, that highway that you’re traveling, and it will show you all the available federal recreation sites along the way," she explained. "That’s what we’re really trying to do, too, is have people think about going to these other places that aren’t the Yellowstones and Yosemites and Grand Tetons that are in such high demand.”

Needles Campground drew praise from one happy camper/Kurt Repanshek file

There are other nuances on recreation.gov that can be used to get the most out of your getaway. Campgrounds on the site are rated by users, who can bestow one to five stars for the site. Click on those stars and you'll be taken to comments left by those happy, or unhappy, campers.

"This is a very special place. We were here in late October 2020, and woke to the first good snowfall," wrote Nora N. about her stay at the Needles Campground in Canyonlands National Park. "Hiking and views in every direction are stunning, campground was peaceful, and the visitor center well stocked with goodies. Loved it so much we are heading back in the spring."

Across Utah at Capitol Reef National Park, Lorette E. didn't have as nice a stay at the Fruita Campground last August.

"It wasn’t camping but more like RV spots, and we were all on top of each other as the sites were too close together," she wrote. "And there are two sites with no fire pits, and we reserved that one and that was so disappointing, not to have a campfire. Additionally there were so many flies it was unbearable..."

Ratings by campers who use recreation.gov say there's some cell phone coverage at Big Meadows Campground in Shenandoah National Park/Kurt Repanshek file

Next to the star-rating line on campground pages in recreation.gov is a "Major Issues" link. For campers looking for WiFi or cell phone connectivity, this link can be a great assistance, or bring depressing news. At the Fruita Campground, for example, cell phone coverage was poor for all the major networks (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile). Stay at the Big Meadows Campground at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and Sprint and T-Mobile have some coverage, according to those who have stayed there.

Something else users can look forward to a bit down the road is the ability to drive into a campground without a reservation, find a vacant site, and book it through their cell phone.

Recreation.gov continues to add new locations, too. Yellowstone National Park officials announced Tuesday that as of March 24 you'll be able to make advance reservations at three additional campgrounds in the park. The Mammoth, Slough Creek, and a portion of Pebble Creek campgrounds will change from first-come, first-served to the advance reservation system. Reservations will go live on recreation.gov at 8 a.m. Mountain Standard Time on March 24. You'll be able to book campsites up to six months in advance.

No doubt, we still will be frustrated at times when trying to make a reservation. But those frustrations are being heard and solutions are being debated.