First off, let me be perfectly clear:

When I say “win”, I mean SCORE. You’ll still pay for your camping reservation. But without trying these camping reservation tools, you may not have a camping spot at all.

RV or tent camping should be fun, not stressful. Yet, when you have to make campground reservations, stress levels can spike after finding one after another sold-out campground.

(Stop breeding, people!!!)

(LOL)

If you want the good places, the popular spots, you have to make them WAY ahead of your stay date.

Yep, the popular/best campgrounds are sold out WAY in advance. Sometimes by a year!

Can you say ‘spontaneous trip’? No, you cannot. Not if you want to stay in some of the best/most popular places.

So what can you do if you procrastinate or you are unable to plan that far ahead?

You only need to know the secret to getting alerted as soon as someone cancels their reservation.

If you don’t know about these websites, you just landed on the greatest invention for campground-stayers since, well, maybe since RV refrigerator bars were invented?

I mean, getting automatically alerted when there’s a cancellation?

Um, genius! That’s why I call it a ‘win.’

In truth, I thought I had sort of ‘insider information’ with one of these websites, as I know the people that developed it. They told a group of us about it when it launched, back around 2015.

It seemed like the most incredible secret ever, though I never used it, as I don’t stay in campgrounds.

I thought it was the only website of its kind until I did my research for this article. It turns out I found four different websites!

(And there may be more.)

The websites use coding that ‘scrapes’ the reservation website every X minutes, looking for openings for what you requested.

 Know that these four websites don’t necessarily check the same reservation systems.

For example, Wandering Labs only used to work with state parks that use popular ReserveAmerica.com and Recreation.gov reservation sites.

But now, they also scrape a few other reservation systems. But not ALL systems.

And they are in the process of adding more.

You can set specific parameters if you wish, such as only scanning for specific site numbers, only scanning sites with 50 amp power, etc.