Legal

Terms of Use

Effective July 21, 2026

In short

  • ParksPermit shows you campsite availability gathered from park agencies. It is not a booking system, and we are not affiliated with any park agency.
  • Availability can be wrong or out of date. Always confirm on the agency's own site before you rely on it or drive anywhere.
  • Use the service for your own trip planning. Don't scrape it, resell it, or abuse the alert system.

These terms

By using ParksPermit — browsing it, creating an account, or setting up an availability watch — you agree to these terms. If you don't agree with them, please don't use the service. Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and forms part of these terms. ParksPermit is run as a personal project from California, United States; for anything in these terms, email [email protected].

We are not a park agency

ParksPermit is an independent service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of BC Parks, Parks Canada, Recreation.gov, any state or provincial park system, or any other campground operator. Their names and marks belong to them and are used only to say whose campgrounds we are describing.

We do not take reservations, hold sites, or collect payment for camping. Every booking happens on the agency's own system, under the agency's rules, fees, and cancellation policies. Whatever the agency's system says is the truth; what we show is a copy that may be out of date.

Availability data is provided as-is

This is the most important thing on this page. Availability, site details, amenities, locations, and dates are gathered automatically from park agencies and can be incomplete, delayed, or simply wrong. Sites we show as open may already be booked, closed, or nonexistent, and sites we show as unavailable may in fact be free.

Confirm before you commit. Check the agency's official site before booking, paying, driving, or making any other plan that costs you something. Do not treat ParksPermit as your only source, and do not rely on it for anything safety-related.

Alerts are best-effort. Availability watches may fire late, fire more than once, or not fire at all — scrapers break, agencies change their systems, email gets delayed. Popular sites are often taken within seconds of opening. We do not promise you will get a site, and we are not responsible for one you miss.

Your account

ParksPermit is invite-only for now, and accounts are personal — one per person, not shared. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping access to your email secure, since anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has gotten in.

Invites you send are your responsibility: send them to people you actually know, not to lists, forums, or strangers. You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and ParksPermit is not directed at children.

You can ask us to delete your account at any time by emailing the address above. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that puts the service or other users at risk, or that we are required to act on — normally with notice, but immediately where the problem is serious.

Acceptable use

The service is here for people planning their own camping trips. Please don't:

  • Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the site, or use it through anything other than a normal browser or an API token we issued you.
  • Resell, redistribute, or republish our data, or use it to run a competing availability or booking service.
  • Create watches, invites, accounts, or requests in bulk, or in a way that degrades the service for anyone else.
  • Break into, probe, or interfere with the service, its infrastructure, or another user's account.
  • Use ParksPermit to break a park agency's own terms, or to acquire sites in order to resell them.
  • Use it for anything illegal, or to harass anyone.

Automated clients are expected to respect our robots directives and any rate limits we set. If you have a research or integration use in mind, email us and ask — we would rather say yes than find out from a log.

The service will change

ParksPermit is a work in progress and is offered free of charge. We may add, change, or remove features, limit how much any one account can use, or take the service down for maintenance — and we may stop running it altogether. If we ever shut it down or start charging, we will tell account holders by email first and give you a chance to export or delete your data.

Content and ownership

The site's design, code, and original text are ours; you get a personal, non-transferable licence to use the service for your own trip planning, and nothing more. Facts about campgrounds are not ours to own, and the underlying data belongs to the agencies it came from. Anything you create — watches, notes, requests — stays yours; you just give us permission to store and process it so the service can work.

No warranty

ParksPermit is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, or that the availability data will be correct. Some jurisdictions don't allow excluding implied warranties, so parts of this may not apply to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost trips, wasted travel, missed reservations, or costs of substitute accommodation, arising out of your use of — or inability to use — ParksPermit, even if we have been told such damages are possible.

Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim (which, while the service is free, is nothing) or USD $50.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the federal laws of the United States that apply there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in California have jurisdiction over any dispute. Many of our users are in Canada and elsewhere: nothing here takes away your right to bring a claim where you live, or the protection of the consumer laws of your own country or province that apply to you regardless of this clause.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service grows. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page, and for changes that meaningfully affect your rights we will tell account holders by email before they take effect. Continuing to use ParksPermit after that means you accept the new terms.