Alberta Parks campsite reservations down compared to this time last year

Heading into the May long weekend, many Albertans usually plan to enjoy the great outdoors or go camping.

During the pandemic, tonnes of people booked Alberta campsites and enjoyed a staycation in the province, partly because they couldn’t travel anywhere else.

Nancy MacDonald, Interim Executive Director Of Visitor Experience And Business, Alberta Parks, says the province is seeing a decrease in campsite bookings now that international travel has opened up and much of the world has eased COVID restrictions.

“Thursday, before the May long weekend this year, we’re at 106,000 reservations. By comparison, last year — which was our record breaking COVID year — at this time we were at 159,000 reservations,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald says it’s still way up from the last normal season in 2019 where they had 74 thousand bookings at this time.

Hannah Cameron, store guide at Breathe Outdoors Calgary, says the camping supply store is still seeing the demand for general outdoor gear.

“There’s definitely been like quite a bit more people so I think a lot of people were introduced to the outdoors in 2020 and 2021 and I think that love has sort of maintained. I think it’s dropped off a little bit but it’s been relatively still stable,” Cameron said.

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However, Breathe Outdoors Calgary has seen an increase in traffic in it’s travel section.

“In the past two years we rarely saw people in travel. Obviously no one could go anywhere, but yeah, within the past couple months, we’ve gotten way more shipment and we’ve had way more stock which is nice with supply chain shortages as well. But yeah, we’ve had surge of customers, a lot of people are travelling.”