⚡ Auto-cart — how it works

What you need first

• ✅ A CampHawk account on the Auto-Cart plan, with at least one watch set up.
• ✅ An account on the site you actually book on — Recreation.gov, ReserveCalifornia, or both.
• ✅ Nothing else. Each lane takes one setup step, once.

Recreation.gov — automatic carting

Cancellations on Recreation.gov happen at any hour, so this lane is a standing setting: once it is on, a watched site that frees up is added to your cart within seconds, whatever time it is.

1. 1

   Set your watches

   Search for a campground, pick your dates, and tap Watch this campground on any booked site. Auto-cart only acts on sites you're watching.
2. 2

   Turn on auto-cart

   Go to Settings and, under Auto-cart, tap Set up auto-cart. Once it's connected the same block gives you a Turn on / Turn off switch.
3. 3

   Sign in to Recreation.gov once

   You enter your Recreation.gov email and password once. They're saved, encrypted, on a private machine we run — the always-on computer that holds your logged-in browser — so auto-cart signs back in by itself if the session drops. They never reach CampHawk's web servers or database.
4. 4

   You're done

   From now on, when a watched site opens, it's added to your cart within seconds. You get your normal CampHawk alert — open Recreation.gov on your phone, and it's already in your cart. Just check out.

ReserveCalifornia — a hold at the 8am release

California is different in a way that matters. When somebody cancels a ReserveCalifornia site, it usually does not go back on sale immediately — it is locked until the next morning's release, and then a lot of people are refreshing at once. So instead of watching for it all day, CampHawk spots the site the night before and offers to be there at the moment it frees.

1. 1

   Watch a ReserveCalifornia campground

   There is nothing to switch on, and that is deliberate — see below. Just watch the park you want.
2. 2

   The evening before, we offer

   When we see a site that is about to be released, you get an alert with a Hold it for me button. Nothing happens unless you tap it.
3. 3

   At the release, we cart it

   At 8am, within a couple of seconds of the site actually freeing, our bot puts it in a cart — so it is off the market while you get to your phone, instead of gone to whoever refreshed fastest.
4. 4

   You take it over

   Open the claim link, sign in to ReserveCalifornia, and tap hand it over. We release the site and your own session carts it, about two seconds later. Then you check out as normal.

Good to know

• Why California needs the hand-off. A ReserveCalifornia cart belongs to the browser session that made it — a second session on the same account reads that cart as empty. So we cannot simply cart a site and leave it for you the way Recreation.gov allows; we hold it, you take it over, and the gap between those two is about two seconds.
• Holds are California only. CampHawk watches ten state park systems that run on the same booking software — Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Wyoming alongside California — and only ReserveCalifornia gets holds. For the others your alert carries a direct booking link: tap it on your phone and finish there. We would rather say so than offer a button we cannot honour.
• No standing setting on California, on purpose. A hold takes a real campsite off the market for everybody else watching it. That is not something to authorise weeks ahead in a settings screen, so it is authorised one release at a time, by you, the night before.
• One grab per site. Once a specific site is carted for you, it won't be re-added — but a different site opening in the same campground still will.
• Cancellations move fast. Getting it into your cart buys you time, but a cart is only held for a matter of minutes — check out promptly.
• This automates your own account for personal use. Keep your watches current so it knows what to grab.