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:

Canada

• Parks Canada
• BC Parks
• Ontario Parks
• Manitoba Parks
• Nova Scotia Parks
• New Brunswick Parks
• Newfoundland and Labrador Parks
• Yukon Parks
• Northwest Territories Parks
• Alpine Club of Canada (ACC)

Australia

• NSW National Parks
• Parks Victoria
• Queensland Parks
• South Australia Parks
• Park Stay WA
• Tassie Parks
• Northern Territory Parks
• ACT Parks
• Stay Rottnest

New Zealand

• New Zealand DOC

United States

• Florida State Parks

We're always expanding to new parks and booking systems. If there's a park you'd like us to add, let us know at help@schnerp.com.

Every new account starts with 10 free email notifications so you can try it out, no credit card required.

Paid plans unlock unlimited notifications, text messages, WhatsApp, push notifications, more active requests, and faster scan intervals.

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.

When creating a request, look for the Double Site or Party Size filters if you need adjacent or group sites.

You can also create multiple requests to watch different campgrounds or date ranges at the same time.

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, email us at help@schnerp.com

A few agencies like Parks Canada and BC Parks have added basic notification features. Schnerp goes further:

• More notification channels: Email, text, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
• More site types: Backcountry, day use, lodging, and huts.
• Flexible dates: Watch a range of dates instead of a single night.
• Refined filters: Electric-only RV sites, waterfront, double sites, and more.
• Works everywhere: One account across dozens of booking systems in four countries.

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.