My wife and I can’t afford to go on a vacation abroad, but we have always enjoyed camping. On long weekends we pack up the family and go to our provincial campground.
Now we have to compete with this pay-in-advance pre-booking crap to even get a spot in your favourite campground because of the out-of-province pre-booked spots and now we get screwed over once more. (The true meaning of B.C. is Bring Cash and lots of it).
We enjoy living in this province with our clean lakes, oceans, big trees and mountain views. But at what cost and when is this nickel and dime attitude; pardon me, it’s more like loonie and toonie us to death in this province, going to stop? I realize we have to maintain as well as upgrade parks in our province. But I think it’s time our province started giving something back to the residents of B.C. who are trying to make a living and raise families and contribute back to this province.
We as residents of this province should be able to get a resident only yearly park pass that will allow us to get a spot in our parks at a fraction of the cost to non-residents plus give us residents priority in the parks for advance bookings.
Last year during our couple of camping outings, we noticed that the reserved area was empty Monday to Thursday and it was reserved only for Friday to Sunday. So people who showed up on Monday, couldn’t get a spot, so they would either take a reserved spot until Thursday or go to another campground, because the powers-that-be decided to make 70 per cent of the total spots per park reserved as of March 15.
So the 30 per cent is full and the 70 per cent is empty until the weekend. How is the park making money from an empty site? Raising the price is not the answer.
We think they need to cut the reserved spots to 20 per cent and have 80 per cent non-reserved to allow for the people camping for more than just the weekend in our province. This would bring in more money for the parks.
The Jackson family