Soon, Californians won't just be booking campsites and buying day passes on ReserveCalifornia.com, the department's centralized web portal for accessing its public lands. They'll be able to dial in all the details of a visit before leaving home: pre-paying for specific parking spots, reserving fire rings at beaches, and booking picnic areas, too.
That's because on Thursday, management of ReserveCalifornia.com was transferred to a new contractor, Texas-based Tyler Technologies, in an eight-year agreement that promises to further consolidate access to the state's outdoor recreation areas under that single, centralized web platform.
"As consumers, we don't just want to go to different places to book the hotel room and book the car and whatever. We want to be able to go to one place, get all of the things that we want the experience to include into our cart, swipe our (credit) card once and move on with life," Sascha Ohler, senior vice president for outdoors at Tyler Technologies, told the Chronicle. "That's the biggest change that's coming under this contract."
Campers and park goers won't see these changes all at once. They'll come gradually over years as the parks department rolls them out piecemeal in pilot programs and trial runs at different parks and beaches.
California state parks see about 68 million visitors per year, more than 6.5 million who come to camp. It's unclear what the public reception will be to the coming changes.
Ohler offered a hypothetical use case of the experience Tyler Tech hopes to provide: A family uses ReserveCalifornia.com to book a day-use pass to a state park, scans a QR code provided via the CA State Parks mobile app at the park's gated kiosk to enter, pulls into a pre-selected parking spot, calls up the park's trail map via the app, then maybe hikes out to a pre-booked picnic shelter for the afternoon.
"What you'll see over the next 12 to 18 months is a more integrated experience," he added.
Park goers won't notice any major changes to ReserveCalifornia.com this year, according to a department spokesman. The slate of new functionalities and "enhancements," primed to roll out on the platform next year, "reflect the department's commitment to continuously enhancing the reservation experience and preserving the natural beauty of our parks for future generations," the spokesman wrote in an email to the Chronicle.
One issue the department hopes to address with Tyler Tech in the coming years is "limited connectivity" at its remote parks, which can stymie real-time updates on things like campsite availability.
"One of the requirements of the contract is improvement of communication infrastructure to facilitate more real-time camping and tour availability," the department spokesman wrote. "The new inventory will include additional reservable tours and interpretive programming, as well as reservable day use parking at select park locations."
The parks department launched ReserveCalifornia.com in 2017 with Conduent State & Local Solutions and US eDirect on contract to manage the web portal through the bulk of 2024. Tyler Tech acquired US eDirect two years ago.
Tyler Tech provides "end-to-end" government-to-consumer software services to "more than 600 government agencies" across California, including numerous county court systems, according to the company.
Consequently, the formal management changeover will soon trigger new rules whereby campers could face steeper fines and penalties for canceling their campsite bookings last-minute.
Those rules, codified into law last fall, will take effect by Jan. 1, 2025, according to the department.
© 2024 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
