Methodology

Each campground earns a booking-difficulty score from 1 to 10 for every month it has enough data. The score blends four signals drawn from historical reservation records:

• Lead time — how far ahead sites are typically reserved. A high median lead time means people book the instant they can.
• Sell-out-at-open — the share of reservations made at the very top of the booking window: the signature of a campground gone in minutes.
• Occupancy — how full the campground runs that month.
• Weekend premium — how much harder weekends are than weekdays.

The weighted blend maps to a label: 1–3 Easy, 4–6 Plan ahead, 7–8 Hard, 9–10 Lottery-hard. Recent seasons count for more than older ones, and a campground-month is only scored when it has enough underlying reservations — we’d rather show nothing than a number we can’t stand behind, so thin months get no page at all.

Every weight and threshold lives in a single configuration file, so scores are fully reproducible: change a weight, recompute, and every page re-derives.

Current status: the live scores are computed from a sample demonstration dataset while real Recreation.gov reservation ingestion is finalized. The formula is real; the numbers are illustrative until the production data lands. See data sources.