Why this exists
Anyone who has tried to book Pfeiffer Big Sur in July — or a Yosemite Valley site, or the South Rim in spring — knows the drill: everything sold out months ahead, and the only way in is catching a cancellation before the next person refreshes the page. Cancellations happen constantly — somewhere in the country a campsite frees up every few minutes — but they get rebooked fast, and nobody can sit on a reservation site all day.
So we built the thing that does the sitting. GetParkAlerts checks Recreation.gov every ten minutes for federal campgrounds in all 50 states — national parks, national forests, BLM land, Army Corps lakes — and watches state reservation systems in 27 states around the clock — 1,966 state park units in all. When availability you're watching changes, you hear about it within minutes.
Who's behind it
GetParkAlerts is a founder-run product operated by Ketchup Consulting, a California-based web and software studio. It is deliberately small: no investors pushing growth hacks, no ads, no selling your data — subscribers are the only customer we have.
What we are — and aren't
- We are an independent service, not affiliated with Recreation.gov, the National Park Service, any state park agency, any reservation provider, or any government agency.
- We never hold, buy, or resell reservations. When we alert you, you book directly on the park's official reservation system like anyone else — you're just first in line.
- We charge $9.99/month instead of running a free service, because speed is the whole product — here's the full reasoning.
The data
Federal campground listings and availability come from Recreation.gov's official catalog. State park listings, coordinates, and availability come from each state's own public reservation system (ReserveCalifornia, ReserveAmerica and others), cross-checked against independent geographic data — we hand-verify park coordinates and have fixed many the source feeds had wrong. Found an error? Tell us and we'll fix it.
What we cover — and what we don't yet
Federal campgrounds are covered in all 50 states. We also alert on state-park campsites in 27 states — California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, Michigan, and 22 more. We're adding new state systems regularly. If your state's park system isn't on that list yet, we still cover its federal campgrounds today, and we'd rather say so plainly than let you find out after you subscribe.
Contact
hello@getparkalerts.com — or see the contact page. A human reads every message, usually within one business day.