In a post earlier this year, I was lamenting the fact it cost $660 for two people to go camping in Ontario Provicial Parks for a week and started looking into the costs in Ontario vs. elsewhere. The Parks increased their user fees a huge amount in 2010 but eased off, having no increase in 2011. In any case it is an interest of mine to monitor the costs of Ontario park fees.
The 2012 user fees are now published, but the data is separated from 2011 to 2012 so I figured I'd take the opportunity to do some analysis of the fee increases for the year, especially in light of the province's survey this past summer that they were hinting of increasing fees even more.
While it is unfortunate the province is still raising fees, at least it is not a drastic increase. Car camping and reservation fees have increased, and the rest of the fees have remained the same without cost increases.
Car camping user fees have increased about 2-3% and reservation fees have increased 20% for call center reservations and 15% for internet reservations. I still feel the reservation fees are rather steep - after all the reservations are completely automated for car camping, and really I don't see why the system can't handle backcountry reservations too without having to call in somewhere, talk to people and have to make instant changes of plans if the area you were planning on going to was already reserved.
Anyways, here's the link to the spreadheet I used to analyze the user fee data, also shown embedded below:
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