With overnight camping set to return to most provincial campgrounds and back-country area next week, the government website to book provincial campsites is slowly recovering after it was overwhelmed when 50,000 people were online as the system went live at 7 a.m. hoping to book a campsite this summer.
The government says there were more than 35,000 camping reservations made as of 11:30 a.m. this morning, with more than 10 reservations being processed every second.
“For comparison, at this time last year the system was very busy, processing 1,100 reservations in one day – today, 800 were processed in the first half hour alone,” said David Karn, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment.
“It’s also important to note that the two-month rolling window means that new sites will be coming online every day, so there are still lots of opportunities coming up to book campsites throughout the last week of July and all of August.”
When the system opened up today, people were able to book reservations for arrival dates up to July 25. Tomorrow, on May 26, arrivals for July 26 will be available, and so on.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, new reservations are only available to B.C. residents in the hopes of giving them an opportunity to camp close to home. Non-B.C. residents with existing reservations will be refunded before June 15, while any reservations made by non-B.C. residents starting today will be cancelled without a refund.
“While we made efforts to be ready for additional demand, this rate of reservations exceeds those seen anywhere,” said Karn. “We apologize to those unable to access the system due to these overwhelming numbers. We thank everyone for their patience and encourage them to keep trying.”
I’m not sure what BC Parks was expecting when when they told the entire province, all outdoor-hungry and cabin-fevered, to descend onto their website all at the same time… #BCParks pic.twitter.com/zrcwMzHuiK
— Spoon (@kokuei) May 25, 2020
BC’s Discover Camping reservation system is failing hard right now. Had a plan, got up early, logged in and spent more than an hour hitting website error after error after error and still haven’t been able to make a single booking. Boo! #BCparks pic.twitter.com/nfFYc0wunZ
— Steven Godfrey 🍁 (@itcaughtmyeye) May 25, 2020
