Arizona State Park camping fees

monkey44 wrote:

Naio wrote:

4X4Dodger wrote:
I think there is a general misunderstanding here. The vendors who run reservation systems like Reserve America have NO authority to raise or lower the cost of any campground or park.

They make their money by charging a reservation fee or in some cases taking a commission agreed upon with the state.

In most states a rise in the park rates would take an act of the legislature.

Contracting with a company to do online/Tel reservations cannot be classified as Privatization of parks.

It'not just reservations.

Aren't some vendors running cg stores, providing hosts, etc.? I have avoided cg's thst sre listed on the forest srvice websites as doing that, because I notice they are always priced higher than neigboring cg's with similar amenities. And because I disagree with the idea and am voting with my dollsrs.

At the biggest national parks, I think the restaurants, bike rentals, bookstores etc., are run privately. I could be wrong.

IF the state parks ran reservations like in the past - one, we'd have better info about sites and true availability. AND, if the PARKS charged the same reservation fee that RA charges ($9.00 or so) it could easily hire a local 'body' to do it, and could save the overhead and costs of maintaining a huge corporation + Profit.

RA often does a horrible job with reservations - so bad, we never use it. Cancellation fee of $17 ??? Transfer date fee of $17, one night reservation fee of $9 -- give me a break.

But what happened? The parks did not reduce overhead, did not lay off rangers (a good thing), did not recoup the reduction in costs and then improve the park. Now, we have the same rangers and volunteers doing the same jobs, but not the reservations ...

So, in fact, just because the park does not raise fees directly, a camper has additional costs to camp regardless of how it circumvents the laws about raising fees. We just call it a reservation fee - and if we don't pay it, we get no site reservation ... so how is that not raising fees? Oh, we call it charging a fee instead.

At least if the park got the reservation fees, anything remaining after paying that cost, would stay in the park. There are tech systems available that link sites to reservations, so a park with few has less to do, and sites with more have greater revenue, so can afford the employee to give correct site info AND not over/under book.

No one will ever convince me the parks and the campers save money and hassle with a private reservation company.

Well let me address the contractors like Xanterra at the natl parks first. Those are, I beleive contracts that are bid out for a set fe plus a commission of overall sales going back to the park. However I am not 100% sure that is the case in all cases.

I myself have many questions about how those contracts are structured and if they are open to public scrutiny. Which they should be.

BUT this is a completely different operation than reservations which I was referring to.

As for State parks doing their own reservations systems at the same or lower cost than RA. This is just not possible. RA can do this so much cheaper than the individual state park systems because they are doing so many other states, they dont have to pay government level salaries and benefits and they bear the cost of the capital expenditures for the buildings and computer systems, maintaining the web site and the servers, paying for CC clearance and on and on. By the time any state got a system up and running it would operate in the RED forever.

I believe that the reservation systems came about because the parks were becoming so popular, spaces were being saved, people not occupying or ghost occupants of sites and many folks who didnt game the system couldnt get into their parks.

As for the cancellation fees. Last Spring I had to cancel a couple of stays at parks. Recreation.gov (Reserve America) refunded ALL my money except ten dollars...a fair deal by any commercial standards.

To me the best system is one where a park has a certain percentage of sites reservable and the remainder first come first served.