I see your point, but I also disagree that they get away with it. Generally, the trend I’m seeing is that if you’re not in the spot by check in the next day, your spot is back on the market. The original rv’er is out that coin for the night.
As the owner of a 24 footer myself, I lean on the side of reservations just so I’m guaranteed a spot. I could boondock, but I’m not convinced that the app is 100% accurate for my state yet.
Honestly though, while this topic is a pain, pollution at the site I think affects us all worse.
As an out of the car camper that is medically dependent upon power, I am kind of tied to elecrical power, and in turn to powered sites in campground, or dispersed camping where I can run a generator. To be blunt, RVs for the msot part have MUCH more of an ability to boondock than tenter do. But this distracts from the issue at hand.
There are indeed scalpers out there that are buying up blocks of sites for certain, particularly high use wekends, and reselling them. The accounts doing this CAN be tracked by insisting on ID authentication to those actually using the site, and fining / blocking accounts of abusers.
We rarely have to cancel or change our plans but on our last trip, we had to return home a week early, necessitating a week’s worth of cancellations. One city park in Utah did not give us any money back since we canceled less than 14 days before our stay. One CA state park charged us $8 to reserve and $8 to cancel but refunded the rest of our money. The pleasant surprise was another CA state park where we stayed the first night but had to leave the next. The entrance booth was not staffed in the morning so we told the host, simply because the campground was full and we wanted the site to be available to someone else. But we were surprised when we received a full refund (with no fees) for our second night. Was it a pain to make all the cancelations? You bet but we wanted to free the sites up for others even if we did not get any money back!
Thank you for your consideration. A plus of FCFS is you come when you can, leave when you need to. And pray you will get a site!
I like others hate seeing a FULL campground and then sites sit empty all weekend. I like reservations in a sense and hate them on the other. I also HATE the fees all the places are charging if they make you reserve on line there should be NO fees.
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