Research · Report 1 · Published 10 September 2026

When booked BC Parks campsites come back: the first eight days

Every few minutes we read the BC Parks reservation system and note which campsite nights are booked and which are open. When a booked night becomes open again, we call that a reopening. Here is what eight days of that looked like, 2 to 9 September 2026.

Most come back close to the date

57% of reopenings were for a night within the next seven days, and 6.3% were for the same day. If you are hoping a full park opens up, the last week before your trip is when it is most likely to happen.

Most do not last long

Of the 16,551 reopenings, we later saw 9,198 booked again before our window ended. The rest were still open when we stopped counting. For the ones that were taken, it went fast: a quarter were gone within 44 minutes, half within 4 h 39 min, and three quarters within a day.

This is why refreshing a page a few times a day rarely works. A watch that checks every few minutes sees them as they happen.

They happen all day

Reopenings pick up around 7 in the morning Pacific time, run at roughly 1,000 an hour from 9 to 5, and keep going through the evening. They only tail off after 9 pm. There is no quiet hour to plan around and no early morning rush.

The busiest parks reopen the most

Reopenings follow demand. The parks with the most are the ones that are hardest to book in the first place. Golden Ears alone had 1,201 in eight days, about 150 a day.

About 2,000 a day

The two quietest days were the Saturday and Sunday of the Labour Day weekend. The last day is partial: our window ended at 5 pm Pacific on Wednesday 9 September.

Weekends come back too

40% of the reopened nights were a Friday or a Saturday. At 1,780 sites, both the Friday and the Saturday night of the same weekend came back at some point during the week. That is a whole weekend, not a stray night.

How we counted

We read the official BC Parks reservation system every few minutes and keep the status of every reservable site for every night. A reopening is one site night that changed from booked to available between two of our readings. We do not know why it changed. It could be a cancellation, a changed booking, or a hold that expired, so we say reopening rather than cancellation.

We left out sites that changed from closed or not operating to available (11 in this window; that is a park opening, not a booking freeing up) and the first time we ever saw a site. Days are Pacific calendar days. Lead time is measured to each stay night. One site can count several times if several of its nights came back.

What this is not. Eight days is a short window, and it includes a long weekend. Our reading cadence got faster for busy parks on 7 September, so the time until a site was booked again is measured more coarsely early in the window. Anything that opened and was taken between two of our readings was never seen, so the true counts are higher, not lower. These are counts of what we observed, not the chance that a site opens up for you.

Data

Download the aggregate tables (CSV): lead time, hour of day, day, top parks, weekend split, and time-to-rebook quartiles. We do not publish per-site data.