Policy Brief
Managing No-Shows in Campground Reservations
Low prices, scarce campsites, and advance reservations can leave popular public campgrounds fully booked but partly unused.
Main Takeaway
No-shows are an allocation problem, not just a visitor behavior problem.
When campsites are scarce, unused reservations prevent other visitors from accessing public lands. Policy design matters: cancellation fees can make no-shows worse, while no-show fees can reduce waste with smaller distributional effects than across-the-board price increases.
Why Policymakers Should Care
Campgrounds in popular public lands often sell out well in advance. If a reserved campsite goes unused, the loss is not only a private inconvenience; it is a public allocation failure that excludes another potential visitor.
Key Findings
- When campground capacity constraints bind, cancellation fees can increase no-shows.
- Modestly higher prices or no-show fees can dramatically reduce unused reservations.
- Higher prices raise revenue but can reduce consumer surplus and discourage lower-income users when income is correlated with trip value.
- No-show fees increase consumer surplus in the simulations and have little effect on the income distribution of reservation holders.
Policy Implications
- Agencies should evaluate cancellation rules as part of access policy, not only as administrative details.
- No-show fees may target the external cost of unused reservations more directly than broad price increases.
- Pricing reforms should be assessed alongside distributional effects and access goals.
- Reservation platforms can collect the data needed to monitor no-shows, cancellations, and equity outcomes.
Policy Lever Comparison
Can unintentionally raise no-shows when sites are scarce.
Reduce no-shows and raise revenue, but can shift who reserves.
Reduce unused reservations while preserving more consumer surplus.
A modest simulated no-show fee attains over 96% of the social surplus gain from the optimal no-show fee.
Increase in simulated social surplus from the optimal no-show fee, set equal to the external cost of a no-show.
Increase in simulated consumer surplus from a $40 no-show fee in the representative park scenario.
Simulation Results
How reservation policies change no-shows and welfare.
Table 1 from the paper compares simulated campground outcomes under alternative trip prices, cancellation fees, and no-show fees.
| Policy | Price | Cancellation Fee | No-Show Fee | Reservations | % Travel | % No-Show | Revenue | Consumer Surplus | Social Surplus | %Δ SS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | $70 | $10 | $0 | 10,000 | 64.1% | 10.2% | $725,681 | $1,134,629 | $1,860,310 | |
| Increase cancellation fee | $70 | $20 | $0 | 10,000 | 65.3% | 15.4% | $738,561 | $1,043,935 | $1,782,496 | -4.2% |
| Increase trip price | $110 | $10 | $0 | 10,000 | 66.8% | 0.4% | $1,132,766 | $1,011,763 | $2,144,529 | 15.3% |
| Increase no-show fee | $70 | $10 | $40 | 10,000 | 64.6% | 0.5% | $736,879 | $1,275,000 | $2,011,878 | 8.1% |
| Optimal no-show fee | $70 | $10 | $150 | 10,000 | 64.6% | 0.000% | $735,378 | $1,282,303 | $2,017,681 | 8.5% |
| Optimal no-show fee, no cancellation fee | $70 | $0 | $149 | 10,000 | 62.7% | 0.000% | $700,000 | $1,298,164 | $1,998,164 | 7.4% |
Notes: Each data point is the average over 1,000 simulated choice occasions. Trip utility is distributed N(200, 75^2), transaction costs are distributed N(50, 25^2), and the probability of travel is distributed U(0, 1). Park revenue is the sum of collected fees.
Paper
Managing No-Shows in Public Resource Allocation: The Economics of Campground Reservations
Published in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, volume 135, January 2026.