Ontario Parks,
Ontario Parks“Dear Chris:
Thank you for your comments and suggestions regarding the reservation cancellation policies.
It is a common myth "that everybody books for 23 night and then cancels later" however, this is not supported by the numbers. For the 2012 camping season there were more than 332,000 reservations processed. Approximately 90% are made for 5 nights or less; with the average length of stay for a reservation about 3.16 nights. There were almost 22,000 reservations made for six to twenty-three nights. In fact, 99.5% of all reservations are booked for less than 23 nights. Lastly, it is also a common myth that the park system is “fully booked” during the busy five month in advance reservation period, this is not true as almost 50% of all reservations are processed less than one month in advance of the arrival date.
With respect to 23 night reservations, in total there were 1,862 reservations processed for 23 nights last year, which is 0.5% of the total, this is not a large percentage. While there are folks who do play the game around cancellations there are many who fully honour those 23 night reservations. Thankfully most campers are honest and do play by the rules. The reservation cancelation penalties that were implemented in 2005 have made an impact on this behaviour and we believe there is a penalty. While you suggest the penalty is miniscule, an additional $80.00 added to a three weekend stay certainly makes that weekend camping very expensive. And yes we have received several comments that the penalty is not high enough. Ontario Parks do have some of the strongest reservation change/cancellation penalties in North America.
Unfortunately this behaviour is concentrated at some our most popular provincial parks, Sandbanks, Killbear, Bon Echo, Pinery to name a few. While it is possible to change the rules…is it really prudent to put in place such inflexible rules at all provincial parks when it is not a system wide problem?? Further this is essentially a five month in advance reservation problem and exists for about eight weeks at a handful of parks. And I can assure you that we have discussed many, many alternatives.
Your petition specifically mentions “People are booking 23 days just to get the campsite they want and then cancelling 20 of those days and keeping the last 3”. If we have misunderstood your comments and you were referring any lengths of stay from one to twenty-three nights, basically any changes in length of stay for all reservations, we would not be able to make any changes to the current policy.
Finally, we don’t want to leave you with the impression that we are not taking your comment seriously, we do; and we have made changes over the years to address this and other situations. In some case the changes has been able to eliminate the behaviour, in other cases such as overbooking it has reduced the behaviour but not eliminated it. Campers do have the ability to reserve up to 23 nights, and have the option to make changes for a variety of good reasons, that’s a fact. We have even tried a pilot project at Killbear to reduce the maximum length of stay on the reservation service to 16 nights, and it did not eliminate the issue and created a new one for folks who do camp for more than 16 nights. We can’t win!!
The issue you identified is one that we monitor closely, in fact your petition is timely, as there have been about 70+ reservations made for 22 or 23 nights over the past two days as people as trying to reserve the July Long Weekend. Thankfully, this behaviour is isolated to a few parks and one in particular.
We note that you have used our logo and image from the OntarioParks.com homepage. The Ontario Parks visual identity (logo) and any images found on the Ontario Parks website are the intellectual property of Ontario Parks and cannot be reproduced without written permission from Ontario Parks. Would you please make arrangements to have the logo and image removed.
Sincerely,
Bruce van Staalduinen
Manager, Operations & Development
Ontario Parks
”
