Recreation.gov
United States government recreation reservation website
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Recreation.gov is the United States government's centralized travel planning platform and reservation system. This public program has grown and evolved since it was first conceived as an information sharing service in 1995. Recreation.gov is the outdoor recreation system for 14 federal agencies to support land management and enable visitors to discover and experience public lands and waters.[1]
Type of site | Travel planning and reservation service |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | United States federal government |
| URL | www |
| Current status | Active |
Recreation.gov is managed under a memorandum of understanding by the Recreation One Stop (R1S) Program, an interagency group of federal agency experts. According to Recreation.gov, the platform is managed by a government team staffed by participating agencies, while Booz Allen Hamilton serves as the contractor and technology partner assisting with product development, customer engagement, and maintenance of the reservation service.[1]
From camping to whitewater rafting to backcountry/wilderness hiking to a ranger led cave tour, Recreation.gov helps agencies and thousands of federal recreation locations across the country manage recreation resources and visitation by providing access to secure and compliant technical solutions as well as dedicated resources and support with training, communications, technical help, data requests, and daily operational needs. [2]
Agencies that offer reservations on Recreation.gov include:[3]
- Bureau of Land Management
- Bureau of Reclamation
- National Archives and Records Administration
- National Park Service
- United States Fish and Wildlife Service
- United States Army Corps of Engineers
- United States Forest Service
- Naval District Washington
- Presidio Trust
The website allows for booking tent camping and RV sites across the United States, as well as tour tickets, timed-entry tickets, day use areas, and wilderness permits. The site has listings for 4,200 facilities and activities and over 113,000 individual reservable sites across the United States according to the website in 2021.
Agencies that share information with Recreation.gov include:
Governance and contract
The United States Forest Service has stated that the current Recreation.gov contractor operates under a competitively awarded, performance-based contract, and that the most recent contract was awarded to Booz Allen in 2016.[4] The Forest Service has also said that reservation service fees are collected by the federal government and sent to the United States Department of the Treasury, which then reimburses the contractor pursuant to the terms of the contract, while a portion of the collected fees is distributed to the agencies that offer reservations on the system.[4]
Congressional scrutiny
In 2023, Senators Chuck Grassley and John Barrasso sent letters to the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior questioning the transparency of the Booz Allen contract and the structure of transaction fees on Recreation.gov.[5] The senators asked how much Booz Allen had been paid to operate the platform, whether transaction-fee amounts were specified in the contract, how much the public had been charged in related fees since 2017, and what steps the departments had taken to disclose the fee structure to users.[5]