I absolutely adore camping. Ask anyone who talks to me about it, and they will confirm. Once you get me talking about it, it’s often hard to get me to pipe down about the glory of nature, the many health benefits associated with it, the quiet joy of waking up at 5 a.m. and basically everything else there is to love about “roughing it,” with little more than a tent, some food and a sleeping bag.
Canada, of all the places to reside, is an absolute treasure trove, as far as options for camping are concerned. I cannot, for the life of me, name a province or territory in which there aren’t a surfeit of beautiful parks to explore. We’re lucky people to have it all in our backyard, so to speak.
So, when someone tries to turn a profit and take advantage of people wanting to bask in the greatness of our parks, I take exception. That’s what a number of unscrupulous travel companies are doing in B.C.
A troubling trend that has been emerging in the B.C. government’s campsite reservation system. A number of companies, many of them branding themselves as tour operators, are doing what is referred to as block-reserving and privately selling campsites. This entails booking and reserving campsites, taking up entire blocks of sites, and then selling them to campers at an inflated rate, to turn a profit. Think of it as scalping tickets to a concert or event, only with campsites.
Those provincial B.C. campsites, in idyllic escapes like Salmon Arm, amid all those mountains, lakes and woods, are a hot commodity to begin with, so many of those sites are snatched up quickly.
Now that certain companies stand to profit from those same sites, some areas are being booked months in advance.
This dishonest business of scalping campsites has become so prevalent in B.C. that a majority of its most popular public campsites are booked solid for most of the summer, this year. In a particularly dirty move, many of the block bookers are taking advantage of people who are from outside the country, selling them access to the booked sites at tremendously inflated prices. Many of those tourists don’t know any better, or aren’t aware they can book provincial sites themselves.
The people who tend to hurt most from such a practice are the locals. They pay the taxes that keep those public parks pristine and viable, and they don’t even get to see the results of that, because they never get a chance to visit those parks.
This has become so ubiquitous a problem in B.C., that Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport has investigated Saskatchewan’s own booking systems, which are similar to those in place in B.C., to make sure similar trends aren’t emerging here.
Luckily, according to the ministry, there’s very little evidence of the practice of block booking and scalping campsites in Saskatchewan. Most of the people (80 per cent) camping in Saskatchewan campgrounds are from Saskatchewan. And most of those people camping here are booking the sites themselves.
It’s a relief that Saskatchewan isn’t seeing gratuitous private company capitalization in its own provincial camping sites. One reason for that is likely because many of Saskatchewan’s parks are woefully underrated when juxtaposed to the hyped-up mountainous majesty of what B.C. has to offer.
All that considered, there ought to be some adjustments made to the laws surrounding the booking of all provincial parks, in case that insidious trend present in B.C. starts moving eastward. There wouldn’t even need to be a lot of red tape.
The ministry could start with just putting a limit on how many sites that can be simultaneously booked. Sure, there are weddings, family reunions and other big events that will inevitably happen during the warm months, but surely those events can be differentiated from a private company grabbing five or 10 sites all at once, or booking multiple sites months in advance. Anything is better than what the B.C. government is doing to address the issue of block booking done by business looking to turn a sneaky profit: Basically nothing.
In any event, I’m grateful for the many sites available here in Saskatchewan, and how that number continues to grow in our provincial sites, now that another major holiday is behind us, and the crowds in hose parks are quite a bit smaller. What better a time and place to get outside, and enjoy?
