How to Get a California Campsite Near You
California state parks and national forests open their booking windows six months out, and they sell out fast. People also cancel constantly. The quickest way to catch a freed up site is a service that watches the reservation system on your behalf and texts or emails you the second one appears. Here is how that works, and how to set it up without paying anything.
Why cancellations happen so often
Plans change. Weather turns. Plenty of people book extra nights as a safety net, then cancel whatever they don’t end up needing. On a busy weekend, one sold out campground on the coast can see a dozen sites open and get rebooked before most people finish refreshing the page twice.
Refreshing the page doesn’t really work
You can park yourself on ReserveCalifornia or recreation.gov and hit refresh for hours ahead of a trip. Some people do exactly that. It almost never pays off, because everyone else doing the same thing spots the same opening at the same second, and whoever clicks fastest takes it.
How a cancellation alert works
An alert service checks the booking system for you, typically every few minutes, and sends a text or an email the moment a site opens for the dates you chose. You still handle the booking yourself on the official site. The alert only tells you when to go look.
Setting one up
- Pick a campground, or an area if you are flexible about which one
- Enter your dates
- Turn alerts on
- Book fast when the email lands, since it is a race against everyone else who got the same alert
CampsiteScan handles this for California specifically, watching ReserveCalifornia state parks and recreation.gov national parks and forests together, roughly 600 campgrounds and 25,000 sites in all. The free plan watches one campground, checked every 15 minutes, with no card on file: just your phone number or email and a 6-digit code to sign in.
What it costs
Other services charge $10 to $30 a month for faster checks or text alerts. CampsiteScan sends texts on the free plan too, and Pro is $9.99 a month for 6 campgrounds checked every 5 minutes.