What’s your opinion about Bots making campground reservations?
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What’s your opinion about Bots making campground reservations?
Over the last several years programmers have been competing to build faster and more powerful bots in order to secure reservations at restaurants, theaters, concerts, hotels and campsites. Today, these bots are grabbing campsite reservations within seconds of when they become available. As a result, ‘humans’ are having less and less success at reserving a campsite.
Should Bots be allowed to make camping reservations on ReserveCalifornia and/or other campground reservation websites?
Cast your vote on our Facebook (page) poll, or please leave a comment.
2 Replies to “What’s your opinion about Bots making campground reservations?”
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I don’t believe there are any bots out there that can reserve campsites automatically. The reservation/checkout process is structured in such a way that it is very difficult to script. Most of the bots out there today scan for available campsites for particular days, and notifies the user that there is something available, but they must login and make the reservation. If the NPS would setup their site so a user could be notified of available campsites, we wouldn’t need these bots.
If you know of a site or bot that can actually make a reservation, please post a link or explain.
Hi John,
You’re correct – at least for bots attempting to get campsite reservations. What one bot was doing though was having people provide their login for a reservation agency (like ReserveCalfornia), and also provide their credit card info. Somehow the bot would login using the customers credentials and get the site. Then the bot ‘company’ had 14 minutes to contact the person to confirm they had the site reserved and to process payment. And of course the bot company would then charge the customers a very high fee for the service. That bot company is no longer providing the campsite reservation service.