HikeArizona.COM

Finally!

https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/bac ... online.htm

xsproutx wrote:but back East? It's almost always a nightly fee

Does it get more expensive the closer you get to DC?

@chumley
Funny enough, to my recollection the stuff that's closer to DC are the ones that are more open to just a single fee (Shenandoah and New River)! Smokies being the exception there. Honestly, if I'm trusting my memory, it's more the state parks that are crazy regulated back east. There's a lot fewer national parks and they tend to be much smaller.

hikeaz wrote:give over half the user fees away to wreck.gov

I was curious about this claim and tried to find information that would verify it. Boy, what a can of worms that opened!

In short, it's not accurate. In detail, it's way more complicated. It seems that the actual fee structure is a guarded "trade secret", but the contract specifies defined commissions to be paid by the government on various types of transactions. Some agencies have publicly revealed that for every permit issued, $6 is paid to the company with the current contract to run wreck.gov (BAH). For every campsite reserved, the commission is $8. The commission schedule for different types of transactions is different and unpublished. The managing agency is in charge of setting the prices (again, my distaste for GRCA falls on GRCA -- not rec.gov).

If you get a permit to park at the Bob Bear TH for fossil creek, the permit itself is free. You are charged $6 for the commission that will be paid to Rec.gov.
If you get a permit to hike in Aravaipa, the permit is $5 (and has been for as long as I can remember). When BLM switched to rec.gov, the $6 permit fee was added. If I go alone for one day, the BLM gets $5, while rec.gov gets $6 ... clearly more than half. But if six of us go for 3 days, BLM gets $90 ($5 x 6 people x 3 days) and rec.gov still gets $6 (6.67%). A larger group results in a lower percent.

So the commission paid to rec.gov seems very high when applied to less expensive permits, campsites, etc. because it is a flat fee rather than a percentage.

I'm not a fan of the lottery systems used just to be eligible to apply for a permit, but it seems that these are imperfect solutions to the problem of people making reservations and not showing up. With no penalty for doing so the system is open for abuse, to the detriment of everybody involved.

There have been a number of articles and columns written on the subject, but I found this one to be particularly good at explaining the details of the system, commission structure, and history of it all, with a perspective that mostly agree with.
https://www.fieldmag.com/articles/publi ... booz-allen

There’s a pervasive sense that Rec.gov and the increase of required permits and lotteries are unfairly restrictive to our right to access public lands. Naturally, BAH is an obvious scapegoat for many of these issues—it’s hard to be a fan of multi-billion dollar consulting companies, and nobody likes fees. Unfortunately, this is just one of the many complicated issues facing outdoor recreation in 2023.

Many common criticisms of Rec.gov are less associated with BAH, and more related to the complicated, challenging decisions that agency officials have to make about managing public lands. The surge in recreational activities over the past five years led to new strategies to manage visitation, but these approaches often come with significant trade-offs. There’s plenty to criticize in this particular relationship, but there’s also a great deal of nuance, and it often feels as if critics are unaware of or unwilling to examine the many trade-offs and consequences of other potential solutions.

In the end, few of us bitch about El Tovar or the Ahwahnee keeping 88% of money we spend to stay there, or Aramark keeping 88% of what they make on that pizza or t-shirt that you buy there because the government couldn't run a hotel or a restaurant if it tried. A Boston bus company is making a killing driving shuttles out to Hermit's Rest all day everyday. Nobody seems to care. I'd like to see some transparency at wreck.gov, but it's not really a new thing for private companies to make money providing services to visitors of public lands. And not even Bernie Sanders would argue that the government could do it better, cheaper, or more efficiently!

@chumley
Who gets and keeps cancellation fees? Who gets and keeps the 'lotto money' (ie - $1.00 Paria/Wave - $5.00 Zion canyons and on-and-on)? Who gets and keeps c.c. fee rebates? If the scheme was/is on the up-and-up; why hide the details? How is it a equitable deal to agree to give wreck ALL the Fossil permit ca$h and USFS gets bupkis. Anyone sincerely think that Xanterra gives a flyer about any of these resources other than how to get access fees from them?....Asking for a friend.

For 20 years it cost the GRCA about $1.M (afi) a year to tend to B.A. & S.K. Trails ......while the Xanterra folks paid merely $100,000 per year in commission on millions of revenue from trail rides and P.R. stays. So GRCA malfeasance or ineptitude in economics gifted Xanterra a TRAIN at taxpayer expense.

And GRCA STILL cannot figure out a way to open the Boundary Road to help west Canyon hikers safely get to a NPS trailhead.

@hikeaz I agree with pretty much all of your points. Especially the ones about how terribly managed GRCA is! But the information about Rec.gov that I shared simply points out that the USFS entered into a contract with BAH to run the website. It was based on specific pricing models that the USFS agreed to ahead of time. Do you and I think the USFS didn't make the best deal they could have? Yes! Especially now that visitation to public lands has increased beyond all projections in the wake of the pandemic.

Being vocal about the profits that BAH are raking in will hopefully help the USFS get a better deal when the current 10-year contract expires (5 + 5 ones). That's coming up soon.

But the lotto and cancellation monies are paid back to BAH because those are the terms of the contract that the USFS entered into. They agreed to it! That GRCA uses those tools to manage visitation in their park is just a byproduct of the existing contract. GRCA decided to utilize a lottery system (and the subsequent fees in the contract) because that's how they decided was the best way to manage visitation there.

Over the past four years, says Delappe, 85 percent of what is charged goes back to the agencies. Recreation One Stop [USFS} does not set those fees, nor does Booz Allen. But Booz Allen’s original contract did include specific fees for various transactions. It’s the managers in the field that set the prices. They of course try to cover their costs and the transaction costs for Recreation.gov.

When you look at some specific fees, it absolutely looks like a terrible deal for visitors -- and for the agency getting no part of the lottery or cancellation fee. Hopefully the next contract addresses some of these questionable distributions. If the actual distributions of fees collected truly are even in the 85/15 ballpark, I might think it's not terribly unreasonable for what the government is getting for it. But I definitely wish there was more transparency to the whole thing.

Another great read that helps break it down: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-a ... -to-death/

@chumley
Pretty much why I don't really enjoy getting out there to popular places anymore. I try to stick to lesser known and used locations, but even that can end up not going as you might like. Such is life in 2023. (Booz Allen Hamilton, a name I remember from the Reagan days; didn't like them then, and not now either, but that isn't surprising. )

chumley wrote:But the lotto and cancellation monies are paid back to BAH because those are the terms of the contract that the USFS entered into. They agreed to it!

Maybe so. I'd like to see if what they agreed to is actually something they're allowed to do under the USFS charter, and the fact that a very important stakeholder (the public) didn't actually have any say in it.

Really, though, I don't have any fundamental disagreement with the idea of having a lottery to control access. What I have a fundamental disagreement with is having an entry fee for the lottery itself. If you don't actually get something for your trouble, you shouldn't have to pay anything - the current system is what is known as "gambling".