Alabama State Park reservation system is awful

[mikestock]

I gave up trying to find a period to schedule a visit to Gulf State Park Campground, online.

Being retired, I'm pretty flexible as to when I could go. I was just looking for a week or so in April or May, that would not interfere with families with school children.

After spending about an hour online, I thought I might have better luck by calling an agent on the phone. I was told that I had to give her a specific date of arrival and length of stay. I began spewing out dates but none had that many days available. I then said that I would accept two consecutive periods that would add up to 6 or 7 days by changing sites during my stay. That was even more difficult to search out. You can spend hours online or on the phone with an agent to accomplish something you can do on Reserve America in 5 minutes.

Comparing this to Florida Parks or COE parks, you can look at a park, see the list of vacancies by date and advance week to week until you find what you want.

The Alabama system looks like they paid someone back in the '90s to design the worst possible system they could come up with.

[doxiemom11]

Passport America costs $44 yr to join. They have over 1,700 campgrounds that participate and give a 50% discount off their normal rate. Each campground decides how many days the discount will apply, if it's valid every day of the week, or for example, only monday - friday, etc. You can look at the campgrounds on their website without being a member. There are a variety of types of campgrounds, including some resorts.

[Gulfcoast]

$44 a year for about 1800 campgrounds nationwide.

[mikestock]

Is Passport America free? If so, $15 sounds pretty good.

[Gulfcoast]

I paid over $100 to stay for two nights there... their extra fees and taxes add up fast.

Just noticed that I can stay at a private campground nearby with Passport America for $15 a night.

[wowens79]

I hate to say it, but you are right, the ALAPark reservation system is horrible. Also like someone else stated all the weekends are booked up. I tried to get a site for during the summer (I've got kids), and every site was booked on Fri/Sat night for the entire summer. There were a few sites that were available Mon-Fri.

Part of it may be due to the campgrounds that were damaged by the Hurricane that hit PCB last summer.

Also, Thanks for thinking about families with kids and trying to go at a time while school is in session. Campsites are hard to find during school holidays.

[Lantley]

Merrykalia wrote:

TxGearhead wrote:
^^^It might be interesting to drive through a park that has no openings on a weekend to see if they all showed. Humankind being what it is, I bet there is a segment of our population that reserves a site well in advance so that if just on a whim they "might" go camping.

This is true, BUT.....

If they pay for it, they can do anything they want to with it. They can let it sit empty or use it, it makes no difference.

Unfortunately the reality is you are right however In an ideal world they should be able to do most anything they want except leave it vacant.

How about a triple the total weekend cost penalty if the site is left vacant the entire weekend?

[Merrykalia]

TxGearhead wrote:
^^^It might be interesting to drive through a park that has no openings on a weekend to see if they all showed. Humankind being what it is, I bet there is a segment of our population that reserves a site well in advance so that if just on a whim they "might" go camping.

This is true, BUT.....

If they pay for it, they can do anything they want to with it. They can let it sit empty or use it, it makes no difference.

[TxGearhead]

^^^It might be interesting to drive through a park that has no openings on a weekend to see if they all showed. Humankind being what it is, I bet there is a segment of our population that reserves a site well in advance so that if just on a whim they "might" go camping.

[doxiemom11]

Yes -- noticing on other sites that people are reserving Fri & Sat nights which mean there is no consecutive 1 week or 2 week period of time you can book. So far at the parks this is happening at it seems the locals are booking weekends at the park. Both COE parks are within 20 miles of a city. We just left a COE park after 6 nights because there was not a single site out of 150 sites available for Sat night so we could book longer. If we had come back on Sunday we could have stayed until the next weekend and then same thing.