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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 7:57 am 
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Joined: August 29th, 2006, 7:57 pm
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Location: Toronto
More on the impossibility of booking a campsite in an Ontario park this summer -

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchene ... -1.5973099

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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 8:06 am 
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I found when I clicked the 'reserve' button right at 7 with everything tee'd up beforehand I got a site. The previous day I had fumbled for a minute or so and they were all gone by 7:02.

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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 9:15 am 
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Speaking as someone with 20 years' IT experience, this is trivially easy to implement for a reasonably experienced programmer. They could put up captchas (those "click all the pictures with traffic lights" or whatever pages), but that's not entirely difficult to circumvent either. I am not really a programmer, but I could probably whip something up to scrape the OP reservations site in less than a day; I know people who could do it in less than an hour. If they think they can prevent this kind of abuse on a technical level, they are sadly mistaken. This is a human problem and it cannot be solved with technological measures.

I know people who do this kind of thing for a living - the airline industry was rife with it before the pandemic. I see it happening now with vaccine appointment slots, too.

The only real way to stop this would be by banning the transfer of a reservation that was booked in the first week or two after a site became available - similar to BC's system.

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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 12:15 pm 
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Joined: November 15th, 2020, 7:21 am
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In case anyone has any doubts, here is an archived Kijiji post from someone selling campsite reservations, and they openly admit to having secured them with bots. It has been taken down now, presumably due to backlash. Scum of the earth in my opinion...


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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 12:30 pm 
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Joined: December 9th, 2012, 9:57 am
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It would be too easy to deal with this in a low tech no tech manner if Parks really wanted to do so. But just in case they've been sleeping through this I'll toss my 2 cents into the pot.
a) 2 week max for any 1 booking. Want longer? No problem. Book the same park/site/month whatever however many times you want. But before you do proceed to ...
b) 100% fee nonrefundable, nontransferable. You want it you pay for it. Up front. Something come up to require cancellation? Unfortunate. Tough love. Camping peeps would have to carefully consider their vacations without the self entitlement arrogance.
Do I sound old and bitter? Ha. Maybe. But I am not. My extended family just booked a week a little north of the busier near north camping playgrounds without any problems. We didn't "have to" play the system. We were willing to compromise and/or do without. We are neither entitled nor special. But we are privileged.


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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2021, 3:01 pm 
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Joined: September 23rd, 2020, 6:44 pm
Posts: 35
Location: Vancouver, BC
PacketFiend wrote:
The only real way to stop this would be by banning the transfer of a reservation that was booked in the first week or two after a site became available - similar to BC's system.


This. Make reservations non-transferable and check ID upon check-in.

BC reservations are 100% non-transferable, no matter when you booked the site. If they discover that the reservation has been resold then the whole reservation is cancelled with no refund. Yes, checking ID means more work for the park staff but you should be getting something for your fees! The level of ID verification in BC varies from park to park but if BC Parks made enforcement of the reservation policies one of the conditions of renewal of a park operator's contract (BC park campsites are run by private park operators), then I bet all operators would check IDs very, very carefully.


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