[zenbob]

As someone who frequently books campgrounds at the county, state, and national level, Recreation.gov provides by far the best user experience for browsing sites on a map and viewing calendar availability that I've encountered. Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem too important to me that Booz Allen is collecting some of its payment as a part of booking fees rather than directly from government contracts. A government website that works this well seems worthy of praise to me!

[matthewdgreen]

Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through.

If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.

[bombcar]

It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver.

But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did.

It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency.

(This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)

[matthewdgreen]

It is perfectly fine to diagnose the pathology that led to this outcome. It is not ok for people to excuse it because “the website works fine for me!” Government agencies need an interface to communicate with taxpayers and “customers” in order to exist. In the 1960s that meant paper mail and customer service agents, and most government agencies were reasonably competent (if sluggish) at handling those technologies. In 2023 and beyond it means smoothly-working websites, and governments have decided to treat these as a weird, expensive mystery technology - long past the point where industry has made website design into something routine. The days when governments could budget $5 to agencies for tech development and/or expect them to spend 50x standard industry prices on broken government contractors are long behind us. And there is no room for this kind of predatory outsourcing. We need to demand a lot better.

[freeopinion]

Even if we see things as charitably as you outline (and well done for that) the contract could be a "portion of the ticket sales up to $X total."

I don't blame Booz for that (entirely). Somebody else had to sign that contract, too.

But if I'm going to lay into Booz, I have to look in the mirror myself. I have worked for employers that charge as much as they can get away with in a market that wasn't exactly fair. When incumbents spend almost unbelievable amounts to build a functioning legislative mote, then exploit that for all it's worth, you could call that "good business." And you can rationalize by saying, "If I don't, somebody else will, so it might as well be me who benefits." But the excuses seem pretty flimsy when historians catalog the damages.

Still, the biggest blame goes to the other signature on the contract.

[bloppe]

I agree it's "not Booz's fault". That's the point of honest graft. It's the fault of our government for allowing them to have so much control over these junk fees.

Still a problem.

[mindslight]

> building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers

Dangerous words on a forum that's focused on the nouveau middlemen of Surveillance Valley.

[genericresponse]

I would argue that the cost is less in setting up than in running and maintaining a site at the scale of Recreation.gov. That includes aspects of customer support.

Many of these agencies are forced into uncompetitive compensation structures which means contracting out most, if not all, of their technical work.

A major part of the issue is the government contracting system. In an attempt at fairness, it has massive amounts of oversight burden. That is, in turn, a barrier to additional competition for the work.

[kerkeslager]

> Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems.

So what's the acceptable upper limit of rent we should be charged to use a website that's already built to use lands our taxes already paid to buy to a company who provides little-to-no ongoing service to us?

[freeopinion]

It's easy to get emotional about this. But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.

There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".

Of course, the hardware and the labor might already be included in the taxes I pay. I don't know that either. I wonder how much work it would take to sort out all the different sources of revenue Booz has from this.

[kerkeslager]

> It's easy to get emotional about this.

For most of Hacker News, it's easier to avoid the emotions that would come with actually looking at the horrible things corporations are doing to our society. You'll defend corporations no matter what, pretending to take the "rational" approach, because you benefit from corporations that are doing many of the same harms.

But being unemotional in the face of constant corporate destructive behaviors isn't rational or normal, it's effectively sociopathic. Yes, I'm emotional, because I have a conscience and I listen to it. You don't get to dismiss what I'm saying because it's emotional. Not being emotional when companies do shite like this is the problem. It's not my emotions that are the problem, it's your lack of emotions that's the problem. Where is your conscience? Why aren't you emotional when corporations do harmful things and profit?

> But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.

Bro, I'm a freelance full stack web developer, and I've been the part-time sole developer for sites that serve millions of customers, because you don't need even one full-time dev to maintain a system to which you're not adding new features. There's literally nothing you have said I'm not aware of, and I'm saying "little-to-none" because that's accurate.

The largest costs here are hosting fees. If the system is at all efficient, that can easily be handled for <$10k/year, but let's just say $100k/year because even that amount is literally irrelevant. Millions of people book with the NPS yearly and pay a $6 fee. There is no way the money here comes even close to being reasonable.

You aren't trying to be fair. You're trying to defend corporations at any cost, like many folks on Hacker News. Your ideology is one of the most harmful forces in our society today.

[thorncorona]

> There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".

You could have this entire setup managed by AWS / GCP for < 1k a month. It's not a complicated site.

And then maybe 1/2 devs for ongoing maintenance.

[shortrounddev2]

You know you still have to pay to enter a national park right? And pay for the campsite reservations?

[thorncorona]

But $9 for a fucking lotto ticket? To something I already pay taxes on?

[shortrounddev2]

It sounds like your issue is with the federal government charging fees for the national parks, not booze Allen Hamilton charging a processing fee for it.

[somehnguy]

That’s not what I got from the parent comment at all.

[bloppe]

"by far the best... that I've ever encountered" is a terrible argument in support of a monopoly. It's legally impossible to have something better, so of course it's the best we know of.

'Exactly how much Booz Allen reaps from Recreation.gov is not publicly known, nor is how much it costs to operate Recreation.gov on an annual basis. The lawsuit contends that Recreation.gov handled 9 million transactions in 2021 and generates “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of revenue every year for Booz Allen, constituting a complete windfall.”' [1]

I'd be surprised if that revenue were below 100 million. A team of a couple dozen competent developers could certainly operate it for a fraction of that.

[1]: https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2023/02/update-lawsuit...

[KennyBlanken]

The contract should have been fixed price, not given a portion of the fees to them indefinitely.

[djohnston]

Perhaps the incentives to build a high quality product are better aligned under this model.

[asdff]

Rather, the incentives to extract ongoing revenue and increase the take as much as possible are better aligned, not delivering the best possible experience for the public. This is not some service ran at cost otherwise it simply wouldn't be done, therefore there is public money being wasted for private profit.

[willcipriano]

Know what would do a even better job aligning towards a high quailty product? Firing the bureaucrats when they fail to deliver one.

"Nice pension you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it."

[mostlylurks]

The fact that the US even has a booking system and restricted access to national parks is indicative of a larger issue, that issue likely being that the number of national parks you have is far too low, and that they are too distant from where people live. If you fixed these issues (which at this point would be politically difficult since it would likely require land reclamations, but not impossible), you might not have to restrict access to national parks.

I, for instance, live in the Helsinki region in Finland, which is a metropolitan area tightly nestled between two modest national parks, both within a reasonable distance by public transport, and both of which I can simply stroll into without any such restrictions or bureocracy. The US could, if there was willingness for it, strive to offer similar opportunities near its major cities. It's simply a matter of willingness.

The other issue is probably that some of your national parks are so iconic (e.g. yosemite) that they'd probably have too much demand even if the country was filled to the brim with alternatives, but you probably can't do much about that issue.

[marky1991]

This interpretation really doesn't seem very realistic. The government can't create more grand canyons or mountain ranges, at least not without raising taxes a few percentage points.

The issue isn't that there are few parks for people to visit, the issue is that these parks are unique and highly popular. There are thousands of parks in the United States, there just aren't thousands of grand canyons, thermal geysers, or mountain ranges.

[freeopinion]

I live within a 5 hour drive of something like 20 national parks. I live within 60 minutes of several National Recreation areas, State Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas with all sorts of different designations. I'm within a 60 minute walk of at least 4 popular campsites.

It is not my experience that the USA lacks in this respect.

But if you want to visit the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, or Zions, or many of these other places, your last paragraph is spot on. The policy of the State of Nevada has been that you cannot reserve campsites in state parks. I think that just changed within the last year for the two most popular state parks. If you want to camp in the Valley of Fire among the red rocks or petrified forest you now need a reservation. If you want to camp just outside the boundaries, there is no reservation required and no fee. Oh, yeah, and no potable water or restrooms, etc.

Note: the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, and Zions are not Nevada State Parks. And you'll have to wait another year now to catch Gold Fever at Buckland Station State Park[0].

0. https://parks.nv.gov/events/gold-fever-12

Edit: Amusingly, the headline of the page at that link proclaims "Nevada State Parks Launches New Reservation System". sigh

[chrismcb]

Most national parks will allow you to "stroll"into them. And the US has quite a few national parks (as well as state parks" but she are more popular than others. It isn't like we can build another Grand Canyon.

[locopati]

Finland, population 5 million

USA, population 300 million

60x people in 29x area

Scale works differently here.

[ip26]

It’s a pretty good website, but considering it’s replaced full-time humans arranging your reservations by hand for a fee of $0, I’m not seeing the fees as reasonable.

It feels a lot like economic rent, with Booz Allen positioning themselves between you and your land. You pay their fee not because the user experience was great, but because it’s the only way to camp at your favorite park.

[shortrounddev2]

You still have to pay for the reservation, even if a human did it