Want to book Milford/Kepler/Routeburn tracks?

costs $10 to use the service, this should be in the commercial forum not the tracks

Good idea (if having to wait for a spot in a hut is your idea of the great outdoors) :-)

fear not, pay a guided company $1500 and book straight away :)

What a bargain. And to think I regularly waste $5 on back country hut passes.

Hmm, okay, so it's basically paying a private service to yank you to the front of the crowd (along with everyone else who's paying them), as long as you can react rapidly enough once notified. What's the cancellation rate for Great Walks? Is it likely that many of the $10-paying people who use this notification service will actually end up still being able to book anything, given they'll still all be competing with each other anyway? (Unless nobody actually buys the service, at least.) It's an interesting idea but I don't think I'd want to pay money to something like this unless it openly disclosed how many other people were also paying for the same notification.

milford sound bookings are snapped up months in advance, routeburn weeks and months in advance, kepler weeks in advance. if the service isnt instant, ie it only updates you once a day you could still easily miss out because the free space will go fast for a popular period and theres no guarantee a space will ever become available especially if you are trying to book for several people. last time i book the routeburn i got the last spaces , i trawled for changing a hut and the space never became available

@izogi, thanks for your reply. The service is letting you the chance to book instead of constantly checking the reservation website (and most likely someone else will be there before you). As for the cancellation rate, I can't give you the exact statistics, however, many cancel. For instance, so far, there have bee 123 cancellations for the Milford track for different dates of the year (and the season has not started). So, yes, the are many cancellations and many have the chance of booking. The service is limited per amount of people wainting for the same period (dont sure yer, but around 10-20 simultaneously). Indeed, as you mentioned, they will indeed be competing with each other. However, they will be competing with another 5-10 couples (since 90% of people that register are couples) and not other 5,000 couples that are checking the website every day. Thus, the chance of booking a spot is much higher (p.s. and considering that the track costs ~300$ per person, than a fee of 10$ out of 600$ is only 1.5%). Hope it answers your questions :)

Hey @waynowski, sure thing. The service checks for available spot 24/7 (within a delay of several minutes between checking the same track). So you will get almost an instant notification. Hope it answers you concerns. Cheers :)

Hi, I had the same idea, but haven't the time for making a service out of it. Just programmed a little Java-console-application which gives me the occupancy for certain periods of certain tracks. I also was thinking about a paid service but came to the conclusion that it's the wrong way to create services around the already slow DOC booking page. My points are: - DOC booking page doesn't have a webservice so it's your responsibility - as a service provider - to be always up to date (maybe they change their page and your parser won't work anymore) - the website is already slow and polling won't be advantageous - pretty subjective argument: I don't like pay to "win" opportunities, no matter if it's an airline, computer game or a great walk IMHO it would be the best, if DOC provides a subscription service for everybody - same chance to react for everybody and best architecture from software developers point of view. Anyway your page is really nice and I like the video :)!