INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESERVING YOUR PARK PASS

Your reservation with us comes with a park pass for all days of your visit including arrival and departure. However, you must still reserve your park entry with Ontario Parks in order to guarantee a space. You can do this up to 5 days before your arrival at
https://reservations.ontarioparks.com/

During peak periods (like the fall colours, Sept-Oct), Ontario Parks limits the number of park passes available for safety reasons. To avoid disappointment we encourage you to reserve your pass the full 5 days in advance. Ontario Parks has a nice tutorial (including a video) available here, or try the following instructions.

1. Click the Day Use tab
2. Select Algonquin - Hwy 60 Corridor
3. Click Search
4. Click the day you want to reserve the pass for
5. Click Reserve
6. Click Acknowledge
7. Check All reservation details are correct.
8. Click Confirm Reservation Details
9. Click Proceed to Checkout
10. Sign in to your account (or create one if you don't have one already)
11. Review the policies and click Confirm Acknowledgements
12. Click Confirm Account Details
13. Click Confirm Occupants
14. Choose Seasonal Vehicle Permit Holder
15. Enter any number between 5-9 digits (for example, 123456)
16. Enter your license plate # and province
17. Click Confirm Additional Information
18. Balance will drop to $0.00. Click Confirm Booking
19. Follow the instructions to pre-register

ALGONQUIN PARK PASS CHANGES
(and why we are not implementing them at this time).

Ontario Parks has changed the park pass rules on us mid-season. Whereas in previous years, we were instructed that guests were only required to register online, they are now insisting that guests are required to register online AND have the physical, plastic pass present in the vehicle in order to be compliant. Apart from the fact that a change of this magnitude is difficult for small businesses to achieve mid-season, it means we are now technically required to:

• buy one full year commercial pass for each site ($225+HST) even though we are a seasonal business and only require summer passes
• distribute, collect and track 21 physical passes, which limits our guest ability to use the park (for instance, we will no longer be able to give out the passes on departure days). We also have to back charge guests $250 if they forget to return the pass
• instruct guests on how to navigate the Ontario Parks system, which is not terribly user friendly

And, we sometimes need to be able to do this in multiple languages as our guests come from all over the world. We estimate this will cost us an additional $5,500 for the passes, plus an extra $12,000 in staff time annually (more as we grow), which makes continuing our free park pass program untenable without a significant rate increase, which we do not want to offload to you our valued guests.

All of this is true, while at the same time, Ontario Parks is not leveraging their own ability to enforce their rules through their own software. For example, if you choose SEASONAL VEHICLE PERMIT HOLDER, ANY SEQUENCE OF 5-9 DIGITS/LETTERS WILL GET YOU A FREE PARK PASS, ANY DAY OF THE WEEK, IN ANY ONTARIO PROVINCIAL PARK.

While our goal is always compliance, at this time, we do not plan to implement these changes for 2024. If you run into a parking enforcement issue in the park while you are with us, please call us or bring it to our attention when you return to our site. Thank you for your patience as we advocate with our MPP John Yakabuski for a better solution that doesn't offload provincial problems to small seasonal businesses.