Scott Hayes | [email protected]
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
It’s been well worth the wait, said Pam Clark-Bell, visitor experience manager for Jasper National Park, speaking about Parks Canada’s new online reservation website for the 2023 camping season.
With frontcountry reservations launched on March 13, Clark-Bell said that the system has already proven itself to be a vast improvement over its predecessor.
“It's been a bit of a whirlwind. The updated platform functioned really well as expected. We didn't have we didn't have a lot of issues at all even though we had about 6,000 more reservations than on launch day last year,” she said.
“We're pretty ecstatic.”
The service provider modernized the web-based platform to ensure the continued stability of the Parks Canada Reservation Service. Last year’s technology was out of date and needed the upgrade.
Parks Canada received 20,378 reservations on launch day this year, which is approximately 50 per cent higher than 13,502 reservations made on launch day last year. That compares to the 1,654 reservations made on launch day in 2009, the first year the site was made available.
Clark-Bell did remark that this year’s launch delay might have had something to do with that. Typically, the system starts taking reservations in January. Parks Canada spent the extra time conducting testing to make sure that the site would operate smoothly for all.
Most user feedback was quite positive also, which speaks to both the simplicity and the duration to finalize each reservation.
“People are happy; they're happy with the system. They're always happy when they get what they want, but they're also happy that the system was really easy to navigate and queuing went well. I think the longest wait time was 40 minutes. Last year, the wait times were upwards of three hours. A real big improvement, I think... a real success,” Clark-Bell said.
Jasper National Park has 1,615 reservable frontcountry campsites at Whistlers, Wapiti, Wabasso and Miette campgrounds. Reservations for backcountry camping went live on March 20, she added, and by all accounts those are going smoothly, too.
At this point, all of Jasper National Park’s reservable campgrounds are full in July and August.
“Honestly I've never seen that before,” Clark-Bell said.
The good news, she noted, is there's still lots of availability in May and September, plus limited availability in June and October, too. October is now the only month that people can get a serviced site. The availabilities in May, June and September are for unserviced sites.
Reservation details and exact dates for each national historic site, national park and national marine conservation area can be found on the Parks Canada website: www.pc.gc.ca/en/voyage-travel/reserve.
