Planner Plodder vs On the Fly

I should have said "ad hoc" with the caveat that we typically travel in the off seasons. Time of year can make a lot of difference in all aspects of travel, not just to reserve, or not. At least for us, it's always worked out pretty well.

Depends on the purpose of our trip. If we have to be at an event or place with a specific time frame, we'll reserve. We also reserve for our themed trips so that we can be assured of proximity to the sites we want to visit.

If we're just wandering around, we take our chances.

We never know where we will be or what we'll see. How the weather is or how I feel determines when we go where, not reservations.

For me, it depends on the situation.

Many of my trips are pretty short due to work constraints, and for those I like to have reservations before I leave as there isn't much margin in the schedule. That doesn't mean the reservations get made months and months in advance; often the whole thing is relatively spur-of-the-moment, only planned a week or so in advance. Often these reservations turn out to be not really needed, as I pull into my reserved site in a half-empty campground, but I do appreciate knowing that the site will be there for me regardless.

For my longer trip to Alaska, I made very few reservations, as I could afford to (and indeed needed to) be more flexible. The few locations where I did make reservations were done so because they were necessary: Lake Louise, Denali NP, places like that...and even those were made not too far in advance.

Ad hoc.