I get that this park is in demand. I get you need to be there the second a site or permit drops. I have successfully gotten permits and sites in the past.
But this year has been a different beast. Usually I am signed up for notifications for cancellations in desired dates- in this case, mid week, not around a holiday. I’ve received cancellation notices not once, but four times now where I clicked the link in <20 seconds of the notification because I was already in my email and the site was already gone.
This has NEVER happened to me before on such a consistent basis. So, I did some poking, and it is absurdly easy to create an agent with Claude to do the entire booking process via AI.
That’s not what I want to do, and feels absurdly unfair to everyone involved. I’m obviously not using a bot to book things myself, but it seems like it’s easy to set up and many others are probably now doing it, which would explain why bookings seem to now be so much more difficult. I’ve been burned on every drop I’ve tried for this season after not being awarded any lottery spots.
Am I missing something? Is there some way that the website actually monitors for bots at prevents bookings? Because to me, it feels like we are entering a whole new layer of hell for obtaining in-demand permits.