Releasing Campsite Reservations In Waves Makes Booking Fairer

IRA FLATOW: We’ve got a good news update for you on a story we covered two years ago. If you remember, back in 2022, we discussed how campsites in state and national parks were virtually impossible to reserve unless you had a lot of time on your hands and you knew exactly when those reservations were going online. Not an easy thing to do. And the people who were able to reserve those sites were often wealthy, educated, and white, leaving lots of other people out of the fun of camping.

But guess what. Two years later, the same team that found these initial results says there’s good news. Many state and federal campgrounds have changed how they’re booking windows work. And as a result, camping has become a more equitable activity. Here with me now to give us an update is my guest, Dr. Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana in Missoula. Welcome back.

WILL RICE: Thanks, Ira. Thanks for having me back.

IRA FLATOW: You know, Will, last time you were here, you said something unbelievable, that getting a campsite at a national park was harder than getting Beyoncé tickets. Is that still the case?

WILL RICE: Yeah, I mean, I guess we could update it to 2024 and say Taylor Swift tickets. But yeah, the demand is still there. But as you mentioned, we’ve had some really cool breakthroughs in improving equity in terms of how those limited permits are distributed across the public.

IRA FLATOW: For a few years now, you’ve been proposing changes to campground reservation rules. Tell us about them. How would they make things more equitable?

WILL RICE: Yeah, so when our original research came out in 2022, we were asked by policy makers and managers, like, you’ve presented us with this data. What should we do to help amend this issue? And so we proposed a few different things.

The one that’s gotten the most traction is the recreation rationing spectrum, which is a management paradigm where you don’t just have a single booking window– traditionally, in campgrounds, it’s like six months in advance– but you have multiple booking windows. So people with different preferences and needs and lifestyles are able to book maybe two weeks in advance or two months in advance or day of as opposed to just a single booking window. And that’s got a lot of traction nationally.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that’s like the concert tickets. They release a certain block of tickets later on, right?

WILL RICE: That’s the beauty of it. It’s a simple idea. And it’s been shown in hotels, concerts. The private sector’s been doing this for a while. And what’s really cool is we can then collect data to optimize those booking windows for people’s constraints.

IRA FLATOW: Well, let’s keep going with the concert analogy because where you have concerts, you have ticket scalpers. I mean, there are campground scalpers, too, people selling off their prime campground spots.

WILL RICE: Yeah, there’s anecdotal discussions of that. My grad students and I have been in campgrounds all over the US collecting data this summer. And we talked to campground hosts who tell us about that, things going on Facebook Marketplace and that sort of thing. But really, the larger issue is just getting that permit initially.

And this isn’t exclusive to campgrounds, right? People who golf in municipal golf clubs are well aware of these same phenomenons happening. It’s just tough when it’s a public resource because traditionally we use price to allocate and ration goods. Any private goods are rationed by price. But we can’t do that with these public goods. We have to come up with creative solutions.

IRA FLATOW: All right, then let’s talk about the successful solutions you have found. Which campgrounds have made changes to their booking windows?

WILL RICE: Yeah, so I often point to Saddle Horn Campground in Colorado National Monument, just outside Grand Junction, Colorado. This is a campground we studied in that breakthrough study in 2022 and found some inequities in how these campsites were being allocated. And the superintendent reached out, saw our research, and said, hey, we want to do better, and has followed through and created really what I would call the gold standard in an equitable recreation rationing spectrum for these campsites.

So at Saddle Horn Campground, they release some campsites six months in advance, some two weeks in advance, and some day of. And it’s really a first-come, first-serve for the 21st century, as you can monitor those first-come, first-serve campsites from your smartphone to see if there’s any availability. So if you’re driving on I-90 on a cross-country road trip, you can stop in and spend the night, as well.

IRA FLATOW: One of your aims was to increase diversity among who gets the pleasure of camping. Did that happen? And how do you know that?

WILL RICE: Yeah, so it’s all of these national experiments that are happening across states and federal campgrounds. We’re collecting data on it right now. So we’ll see if this yields the diversity and the reduced constraints that we theorize it will. So we’re actively collecting data on that. And so maybe in a year or so we’ll be able to have the data To? Talk through some of those and how we might improve these systems moving forward.

IRA FLATOW: Any way to give us a hint right now about which campsites we should be looking at or–

WILL RICE: Yeah, for sure. So in the state of Montana, for instance, we had legislation that passed through our legislature and was signed by our governor recently that overhauled campsite rationing in accordance to a recreation rationing spectrum. So we have some sites available first-come, first-serve that were not previously available first-come, first-serve so that locals are able to access these resources that potentially they really heavily rely on for outdoor recreation access.

And so we can monitor who’s camping in those campsites. Are those locals who, from an environmental justice perspective, might be really reliant on those natural resources for their well-being if they’re able to access those? So state of Montana, state of California, state of Minnesota all have changed rules, some due to administrative rule-making. In California and Montana, it’s through actual legislation, in both cases passing unanimously, which really tells you there’s a lot of support for this.

IRA FLATOW: Hm, first-come, first-serve, hey, what a radical idea. [CHUCKLES]

WILL RICE: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, I mean, it’s coming back, I think. And we can update it to fit and potentially even improve it using technology such as recreation.gov. And you can monitor these things in real time.

IRA FLATOW: I know that, as a scientist, you’ve got to be really excited about seeing these changes happening so fast. I mean, did that surprise you how quickly they changed?

WILL RICE: Yeah, I mean, often we publish these papers, and they’re read by our colleagues and a relatively small field like mine, outdoor recreation research. It’s read by a handful of folks across the country and globally. And you get a pat on the back at a conference, and that’s it. So this is really surprising.

When we published this paper, it really took off like crazy. And so I had to take off my scientist hat for a moment and put on more of an outward-facing hat to discuss the science with policy makers. In 2022, I was asked to testify to Congress about this issue. And that was a very different experience than my day to day here on campus. And so, yeah, it’s been really rewarding.

But it’s also been a little testing of the comfort zone here and there. As scientists, we’re generally, fairly insular. We’re talking to each other, but it takes a different skill set to communicate those results to the public and then also to really look at your data and propose bold solutions like we did, you know, a recreation rationing spectrum to be adopted by federal land management agencies. That took some doing.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, and it’s good that you were out front there. OK, now that you’ve got that done, what other changes– because there’s always something in the future– what other changes that you want to see to make camping and outdoor recreation more equitable?

WILL RICE: Yeah, so we’re doing a lot of research on this topic right now, as you might expect, across front-country camping, backcountry camping. One of the things my students and I are really interested right now– I have a grad student who’s studying camping in the American West from a political ecology standpoint, understanding access, who’s able to access these things, looking at all sorts of constraints that people might face.

One thing that we’re really interested in here in Montana is agricultural communities and how they’re able to access the outdoors. If you have a six-month booking window, if you’re in an agricultural community, potentially you can’t plan that far in advance because you don’t know what Mother Nature is going to do and how that’s going to influence the harvest. So we’re looking at these communities that really haven’t been examined too much in how they might access the outdoors.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you, Will. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

WILL RICE: Yeah, thank you, too, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana. Of course, that’s in Missoula.

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