Home › Methodology

How we measure booking difficulty

Once a day, for each tracked campground, we read Recreation.gov's public month-by-month availability for the next 90 nights. Each site-night is either Reserved, Available, or something else (closed, not reservable, first-come-first-served, not yet released). Only Reserved and Available site-nights count as bookable inventory.

• Weekends booked: Reserved ÷ (Reserved + Available) over Friday and Saturday nights in the next 90 days.
• Weeknights booked: the same for Sunday–Thursday nights.
• Dates with an open site: how many of the next 30 nights have at least one Available site.
• Difficulty score (0–100): 70% weekend booked share + 30% scarcity of open dates in the next 30 days. 85+ Very hard, 65+ Hard, 40+ Moderate, otherwise Easy.

Limitations: dates are interpreted as calendar dates in UTC; campgrounds that release inventory on a rolling window will look emptier far ahead than they really are; group sites and lottery campgrounds are excluded or may skew numbers. Snapshots start in October 2026 and accumulate daily.

We request data slowly (a few campgrounds every few minutes) to avoid loading Recreation.gov.