It's definitely a prisoner's dilemma type of situation— no one wants it to be like that, but once there's a critical mass of people doing it, then you kind of have to. Once everyone does, you're back to square one, except with a system based on unwritten rules that are confusing and exclude the uninitiated.
And it's not obvious how to fix it in a way that doesn't screw up the system for someone else:
- exorbitant cancellation fees would punish people whose plans change, and a lot of people would just swallow the extra cost anyway.
- insisting that the entire timeframe be in scope at time of booking would make it hard or impossible to book longer vacations at popular spots (which at this point is basically anything within 4h of Toronto).
- making the whole season available at once would create an ultra high stakes feeding frenzy, with the servers probably ending up crashing.
- some kind of bidding or lottery setup would be extra complexity, and would end up rewarding people with the time, money, and schedule flexibility to "play" whatever the system is.
I suppose the Ontario Parks mandate is to just maximize utilization, so from their point of view it doesn't really matter as long as weekends are booked solid and at least some proportion of the canceled midweek days end up being scooped up later by retirees or whoever.
And it's not obvious how to fix it in a way that doesn't screw up the system for someone else:
- exorbitant cancellation fees would punish people whose plans change, and a lot of people would just swallow the extra cost anyway.
- insisting that the entire timeframe be in scope at time of booking would make it hard or impossible to book longer vacations at popular spots (which at this point is basically anything within 4h of Toronto).
- making the whole season available at once would create an ultra high stakes feeding frenzy, with the servers probably ending up crashing.
- some kind of bidding or lottery setup would be extra complexity, and would end up rewarding people with the time, money, and schedule flexibility to "play" whatever the system is.
I suppose the Ontario Parks mandate is to just maximize utilization, so from their point of view it doesn't really matter as long as weekends are booked solid and at least some proportion of the canceled midweek days end up being scooped up later by retirees or whoever.