Your questions, answered

We help you find available sites at sold out campgrounds.

With parks opening for reservations months in advance, and popular campgrounds selling out within minutes on opening day, we discovered that the best way to get a site is when someone’s plans change and they cancel their reservation.

To find a cancellation, you could monitor the campground's website and refresh the page over and over again, or you could tell us what campground you're looking for and let us do the hard work.

First, you create a request, telling us what campground you're watching, your arrival dates, and your preferred campsites.

Then, our system takes over and scans your selected campground for a cancellation. If one of the sites in your availability window becomes available, we send you an email (or a text) with a link to book the spot.

Please keep in mind, finding an opening is never guaranteed. If there's no availability today, we have to rely on someone else cancelling their existing reservation, and sometimes that just doesn't happen.

It's a word my friend group uses when talking about hunting powder on a ski resort a few days after a storm. We'll put in massive efforts, staying high on traverses and suffering long run-outs, just to schnerp a single turn in untracked snow.

In that context, it vaguely means to acquire a scarce resource. When I was thinking about names for this project, I realized we're doing the same here, just with campsites.

Also, it's really fun to say.

No. We only monitor the availability of sites in campgrounds and notify you of an opening. It's up to you to research which one is right for you, and make the booking via the park's reservations system.

Right now, you can watch for campgrounds in the following networks:

• Parks Canada
• Alberta Parks
• BC Parks
• Ontario Parks
• Alpine Club of Canada (ACC)

We're always looking to expand to more provincial parks and other booking systems, but we can't promise anything since each system has it's own unique set of integration challenges.

Every new account starts with 10 free email notifications so you can dial in your requests and Schnerp one or two on us.

If you need more, or want advanced options like text messages, you can subscribe to a paid plan.

Read more about our pricing.

Right now, we're averaging a scan every 2-5 minutes, but this isn't guaranteed.

There's a lot of factors that can cause this scan speed to vary. Sometimes we run into a technical challenge that can slow down the scan interval or stop scanning altogether.

This a major focus in our development effort, and we're always looking at ways to scan faster to give you the best odds of schnerping a spot.

Some frontcountry campgrounds offer “double sites” which are located next to each other and have to be booked in the same reservation. For these campgrounds, you'll see a Double Site filter button that you can select on the request form, and will be notified when both become available.

For the ACC Huts, you'll see a Party Size option on the request form.

For backcountry sites and day trips, you'll be notified wheneverat least one campsite is available.

In this case, there's a chance you might get lucky and see two sites become available at the same time for the same night, but you'll have to check the reservation site to find out.

For the campgrounds that we do support, we run an automated process to collect a campsite list. This process isn't perfect and occasionally, we miss some.

Backcountry sites can sometimes be tricky to find, hidden behind another name or in a different section of the campground page.

If you find a mistake in the site listing, please let us know.

We're pleased to see Parks Canada taking steps in this direction, but their built-in system may not meet the needs of all campers. We've outlined the key differences below.

• Watch More Sites: Schnerp allows you to monitor backcountry, day use, and lodging sites.
• More Notification Options: Schnerp offers text and push notifications.
• Watch More Dates: Schnerp lets you select flexible dates.
• More Requests: Schnerp allows for more than the built-in limit of 5 requests.
• High Fidelity Notifications: Schnerp provides precise information about which campsite is open right in the email/text.
• Refined Filters: Schnerp offers filters for electric-only RV sites and specific waterfront sites.
• History Tracking: Schnerp keeps a record of past openings.
• Single Source: Schnerp can be used for bookings across a variety of reservation systems.

Try us both out and see which one works best for you.

No, we feel very strongly about not abusing park websites. Our service is designed to combine scans from multiple requests into a single query, which is more efficient than if every person manually refreshed the page themselves.

Much like when we're out in nature, we do our best to leave no trace.