Ontario Parks

So can you tell us, uh, take us a little bit through what you found with, uh, bots as far as the, the camping reservations are concerned?

Because of the requirement that people have to have a verified account in most of these booking systems, it makes it hard for there to be, like, crawler bots that can just, like, sweep up a large number of, of reservations the way that, like, those do exist for concert tickets, right? And so what's happened instead is what The Globe and Mail was able to successfully do with Ontario Parks was they built a bot that essentially they could pre-program to be ready to go after a desired reservation at the moment that the, uh, booking window opened.

Um, and so, uh, funnily enough, they actually, in order to create the bot, they actually used an AI agent to create the bot.

Um, someone who's involved in their kind of AI reporting went through that process.

They were able to build a similar bot that could quickly, that could basically move faster than a human to grab, um, open reservations, and that's kind of the big thing.

It's, it's less that people are gonna be able to create or, like, companies are gonna be able to create sw- like, these crawler bots that sweep things up.

But it's more that people, um, would be able to have bots that can move faster than a person to put them either at the front of the parks candidate queue or be able to grab reservations in a rolling booking system, uh, like BC Parks or Ontario Parks faster than a human would be able to click.

And so that does, again, like, create kind of the ability in there, and it does potentially incentivize someone who can make these bots to possibly make and sell them to people beforehand.

And one that's also very busy, so if you're planning to go, make sure that you get, like, a day pass before you go.

I think, I think Ontario parks just do, like, regardless of when it is, they're always busy.

Well, yeah.

So Arrowhead rea- reaches capacity though very quickly.

[laughs] Yeah, so some of the winter activities, so f- 450 kilometers of cross-country ski trails across Ontario.

Many parks have warm-up shelters too.

Some of the best snowshoeing in Ontario is in Ontario Parks.

Um, skating trails like Arrowhead, Tim mentioned, McGregor Point, Sleeping Giant.