Reserve America vs Recreation.gov?

[CharlesinGA]

Originally Posted by ArtJoyce

Reserveamerica is a private company, they partners with many public entities such as states and private business.

Reserveamerica (RA) installs and provides support for the reservation system. The states users the same system when you wake in. Big saveings compared to RYO (roll your own) and tech support.

So the system makes it very hard for a state to divorce RA. The only thing the state owned is the transaction database and customer data base, except usepaswords.

Ohio fired RA in early 2020. The ohio system still is subpar to the RA. The good thing is reservations fees are less. Accept there is no walk-in with the virus, you have to use the reservation system and pay the fee.

For us that does not work well. When we are not traveling we like to just head to a SP from to sunday through Friday when ever we like. We can always find a nice CS. We get a a 50% discount for those. It ends up the reservation fees are about a 1/2 camping fee.

When the Federal Government rebid Recreation.gov a while back (3 years or so ago) there was a big mess, still is. All of the campsite maps and specifications (water, elect, length, etc) was propriety data owned by the contractor (which I think was Reserve America). Only the bare minimum stuff got transferred to the new contractor, who had to build a new site from scratch. Its still doesn't look as nice or work as well as the old site, and they are still trying to scratch up maps of campgrounds, lots of data missing yet.

I know my account got screwed up and I had to re-sign up using a different email, it would not let me use my regular email and my old account info did not function. I called them and they were lost, as everything was new to them. What a mess.

Reserve America is pretty good, if you put in a name of a campground or location they do not service, you will get some basic information about it and usually a link to who you need to go to.

Charles

[Agesilaus]

Recreation.gov has a bug, or another bug I should say. If you use one of the park passes it will not let you check out of park A and into park B using the same pass. Say you leave one COE cg on Tuesday and want to check into another COE cg that afternoon, it will just give you an error message telling you that you cannot use the pass since iit has already been used that day.
I complained to them and their answer was, use the phone.
Also if you start to make a reservation, say on Wednesday and for what ever reason you back out after putting you pass number in, that's it for that pass number on that day. Even tho you never completed the reservation.
My wife and I both have passes so if I'm careful we can work around this but it was a PITA when we stayed at a string on COE parks working our way west this last summer.
A hint for those who have ACCESS passes only, you can get multiple passes, just present your paperwork at the next park and they will give you another pass. They do not track passes issued to you and don't know if you have one or not. I'm not sure is you could get an access pass at a COE park tho, most do not have a visitor center.

[Teamfoxy]

Have never had a problem with recreation.gov and I use our senior pass all the time. I have a lot of complaints about reserve america from the high fees to problems getting refunds when the site was unuseable with no other site available.

[Agesilaus]

Originally Posted by Teamfoxy

Have never had a problem with recreation.gov and I use our senior pass all the time. I have a lot of complaints about reserve america from the high fees to problems getting refunds when the site was unuseable with no other site available.

Just curious, have you used the Senior Pass to check out of one park and check into another on the SAME day? Maybe the glitch just occurs with our Access passes

[Bigd9]

Originally Posted by Teamfoxy

Have never had a problem with recreation.gov and I use our senior pass all the time. I have a lot of complaints about reserve america from the high fees to problems getting refunds when the site was unuseable with no other site available.

We just went through this. The day after we arrived at state park, park employees posted signs indicating all trails were closed due to a deer herd thinning hunt that was to start! We asked Reserve America for a refund or a transfer to another state park. Everyone was nice and we ended up getting a full refund minus the one day we were there 7 days later.