Michigan State Parks Fee Nightmare

wfred wrote:

I guess I have different expectations from everybody else on this forum. I travel all over the country for work and change reservations quite often. Never have I been stuck with a fee for moving a reservation a day or two one way or the other.

Booking at state parks isn't like booking at a hotel on a business trip. If you don't get a room at one hotel, the one across the street will take you. But state parks are vacation destinations, and if you want to vacation in a particular area, that particular park may be the only one around.

For many of the MI state parks, once the reservation center opens in the morning, it takes only a couple minutes before all the campsites are snatched up. The policies were established to discourage people from playing games by booking one set of dates (for the sake of securing a campsite), then amending their reservations to the dates they really want. So there are no changes of reservations allowed -- any changes are the equivalent of cancelling and creating a new reservation. And while you're creating that new reservation, you do run the risk of the campsite being booked by someone else.

You may not like those policies, which is fair, but they were clearly stated before you accepted the agreement. Now you're trying to back out of your end of the deal, but crying foul at them. What if you had arrived and found they had given away your campsite? What if they did so because the incoming campers had a very good reason for needing that site? I'm guessing you wouldn't find that acceptable.

-- Rob