Trying to book a California campsite last-minute? New app offers a neat hack (2025)

A San Francisco startup aims to help Californians make last-minute bookings at their favorite campgrounds.

Campsite Tonight is part of a growing slate of apps and services designed to help people navigate the increasingly competitive, increasingly digitized practice of securing a trip at their favorite campgrounds. It was launched last year by developer Mike Lee and has built up a base of about 5,000 users— mostly Californians hunting for campsites in California.

“I’m trying to be your camping travel agent,” Lee said.

Reservations at the most desired campgrounds in the state are snapped up within moments of being made available online for dates months in advance. That doesn’t leave much for the last-minute planners, and a small cottage industry of apps like Campnab and Campflare will send text message alerts to users’ phones when a site they desire becomes available — usually via a cancellation.

Campsite Tonight is similar in that it notifies users of site availability for their preferred camping dates and campground locations. But the app has a couple of unique and appealing attributes.

First, the app taps into a wide swath of web portals that manage thousands of campsites across California— beyond Reserve California and Recreation.gov, the sites for booking at state parks and beaches, and at national forests and national parks. Campsite Tonight is more granular in that it includes listings from booking platforms at several county parks — including Sonoma, Solano and Santa Clara— as well as RV parks and private campsite listings on Hipcamp.

“There are about 100 campgrounds within 100 miles of San Francisco, and they’re managed by about 50 different websites,” Lee said. “So if you’re looking just at Recreation.gov and Reserve California, you’re probably only seeing 20-30% of the total inventory.”

Second is Campsite Tonight’s add-to-cart feature. When a desired booking becomes available, the app will automatically move it into a user’s virtual cart, thereby setting it aside temporarily— a neat hack that can buy campers critical minutes to secure a booking.

Recreation.gov, for example, gives users a 15-minute reservation window once a booking is moved to a user’s cart. That might not seem like much time to act, but it’s a luxury amid the micro-second speed race of securing these sites when they become available.

“Even cancellations are tough to snag at popular places like Yosemite or Fallen Leaf (in the Lake Tahoe basin) or Kirk Creek (in Big Sur), so that add-to-cart feature has really resonated with people,” Lee said.

The app redirects users to the respective campsite booking portals; you can’t book through the Campsite Tonight and the app won’t automatically complete a booking.

A $10 monthly membership or $40 annual membership gives users three “add-to-cart” alerts and five availability alerts at any given time.

Lee says his target demographic is experienced California campers comfortable cobbling together a last-minute trip.

“This is for people who go frequently, who have spots in mind where they want to go and are willing to wait for them to open up,” Lee said.

Reach Gregory Thomas: gthomas@sfchronicle.com