[ilikehurdles]

Years ago in Texas I wrote a simple selenium webdriver script to check on the status of available camp spots in a popular state park and notify me when one became available. Kind of a last ditch effort to camp as people would book months ahead of time but would sometimes cancel their reservation when they realized they can’t make it. I think they’d do it before their small deposit became non-refundable.

The alternative of manually checking every day would have likely resulted in never getting a spot. I was using my skills to hack together a solution for myself in a crappy situation.

[mgontav]

This was pretty much my experience as well: had to build a small scraper 2 years ago to alert me whenever spots for camping became available in Yosemite. Bear in mind that this was around 3-4 months in advance. Just for the sake of it I let it run after we had the spots, to understand how many people cancelled, and the amount of cancellations are actually insane.

While I don't think my approach was too harsh (I wasn't constantly querying nor booking automatically), it could be solved if they provided their own alert system, or discourage the book-cancel behaviour (higher cancel fees? Might not make much sense since the camping itself is pretty cheap...)