Well yesterday January 9th, 2019 was the first day of bookings for Banff National Park. As expected there was such a flood of people trying to book sites that Parks Canada’s servers bogged down and stopped processing requests for the morning until the powers at be allocated more resources to their booking server. In under three hours there was over 13,000 booking requests which explains the slow down on the booking server. As I have predicted Camping is getting very cut throat as more and more people join the ranks of the Canadian camper. Of course there are also international guests to contend with too. As I have said in previous posts and articles planning is the way to go and it appears that many people are heeding my advice, and are planning out their summer camping season and booking in advance.
I was also caught up in this booking storm for a Banff site for a weekend getaway and nearly did not succeed. Certainly I did not get my first choice in sites and had to scramble to find one at my second and third choices. In the end I managed to get a fairly good site at Tunnel Mountain II which is more of an RV park then a rustic campground, but it took me over an hour to get the site booked.
Read about the whole debacle here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/banff-campsites-2019-summer-reservations-website-1.4971963