Help and FAQ

Search for a park or campground to see the areas you can monitor. Supported reservable day-use areas, including picnic areas and shelters, can also have alerts. Choose a visit date for day use, or arrival and departure dates for an overnight stay. The Coverage page shows our current reservation-system coverage.

You can monitor sold-out dates when an area supports online reservations. Areas closed to online reservations are hidden from search. A hidden area can return once we verify that reservations have reopened and availability can be checked reliably.

Most active alerts start on about a 10-minute schedule. OpenCampsite may check high-demand parks sooner and quiet parks less often, and provider outages or processing load can also affect timing.

An alert fires when someone else cancels a reservation, and cancellations are unpredictable — many alerts catch an opening within days, others never do, especially for the most popular sites. We check around the clock either way. For the best odds: widen your date window, watch a whole campground rather than one specific site, and set alerts as early as you can.

OpenCampsite checks the reservation site's availability against your alert settings, but we don't check every local booking rule when you create an alert or when we send a notification. Open nights may still fall outside a campground's minimum or maximum stay rules. An alert tells you what we found; the reservation site decides whether you can book it. Check the campground's rules when setting up your alert and before booking.

Yes. Set the dates you want to watch and the minimum number of consecutive nights you would accept. That minimum is not a maximum: if a longer stretch opens, your notification may include it. Watching a broad window doesn't mean you have to book every night, or that the campground allows a stay that long. Choose dates within the opening that fit both your plans and the campground's rules.

A campsite can have more consecutive nights available than the campground allows one camper to stay. Your alert may show the full opening so you can choose dates within it, but the campground's stay limits still apply. Check the rules before booking, including whether separate reservations count toward the same limit.

Read the reservation site's message, then adjust your arrival and departure dates to a stay it allows within the opening. Check that the campsite is still available for those dates before booking. Our booking links vary by reservation system: some include the campsite or dates, while others open a park or property page where you enter the details. Always confirm the park, campsite, dates, and equipment on the reservation site. OpenCampsite does not hold or book a campsite for you.

Yes. Free beta access includes 3 trips at a time, up to 6 campgrounds each, checks about every 10 minutes, and text, email, or both on each alert, with no card required. Standard and Plus are planned for after the beta. Existing founding campers will automatically get 50% off their first 12 months if they later choose a subscription. Public checkout is not open during the beta, and nothing will start charging silently.

When the beta ends, alerts you already created keep running until their trip dates pass. New plan limits apply only when you create or resume an alert.

When paid plans launch, cancellation will be self-serve from the billing page through Stripe. Cancelling will stop future charges while leaving the plan active through the period already paid for. No emails, phone calls, or retention scripts.

Your first subscription has a 7-day money-back guarantee — email us within a week of your first payment and we'll refund it in full. After that, we don't refund based on whether a campsite opened up: alerts watch for other campers' cancellations, which no one can guarantee. Billing mistakes are always refunded. Full details on the refund policy page.

Alerts you already created keep running until their trip dates pass — we never turn off an existing alert because of a plan change. Plan limits apply when you create alerts: if you're over your new plan's limit, existing alerts finish out normally, but you won't be able to add new ones until you're back under it.

Get text, email, or both on each alert. Enable browser notifications separately in Account for all your alerts. Some devices need OpenCampsite added to the home screen or dock first.

We track every email and text we try to send. If delivery fails, the opening remains eligible for a later notification instead of being treated as successfully delivered.

Yes. From Alerts you can pause, resume, or delete an alert and change its trip dates. Choose text, email, or both on each alert; account-wide push can notify your connected devices for all of them.

Every alert email includes a link that pauses just that alert — one click, no sign-in needed. Resume or delete it anytime from Alerts.

You're giving OpenCampsite permission to send alert confirmations and availability updates to the email address you chose, and agreeing to the Terms and Privacy Policy linked from the alert form and footer.

The alert turns off by itself — no more checks or notifications for dates you can no longer book. Its activity history will note that the trip window ended.

No separate signup or password is needed. Verify your email or phone to create an alert. Use that same contact to sign in and manage your alerts from another device. Every alert email also includes a link to turn off that alert without signing in.

Open the alert from Alerts. You'll see its current status, recent checks, every notification we've sent, and — if something is preventing checks from completing — a plain-language note explaining what's going on.

Email hey@opencampsite.com with the campground name, your trip dates, and the email address or phone number used for the alert. Your alert's recent activity timeline helps us see exactly what happened.