The Curious Case of Crystal Cove’s State Park Beach Cottages

Photo: tinyfroglet

Are you scanning for availabilities for cottages at Crystal Cove. If so, you might have received some false notifications, today. You’re not alone, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience. This one took us a bit of time to get to the bottom of, but we now understand what’s happening.

These beach cottages are in exceptionally high demand. As such, several folks are running scans for new availabilities. These cottages are largely sold-out. That said, Premium Cottages 29, 38, and 39 are flickering from available to unavailable sporadically on Reserve California’s system. When they show as available, our system sends an alert. Unfortunately, these units often aren’t available.

We’ve learned that these three cottages are dorm-style units. This means that they can typically be occupied by multiple parties. However, they can only be occupied by a single party at this time—due to COVID restrictions.

This will change in the months to come. More people will get vaccinated and the state’s parks will resume normal operations. In the meanwhile, though, these 3 units can only be reserved 30 days in advance.

Unfortunately, the date window on these units is misbehaving. As such, Reserve California continues to show these as available for booking—for dates that aren’t yet reservable.

If you’re receiving unwanted alerts for these units, one workaround is to turn off alerts on these three units. You can do so by editing your scan, and selecting all but the dorm-style cottages, like this:

In the future, you can come back to this scan to turn scanning back on for these three units. In the meanwhile, though, this filtering will keep your scans running on all of the other units—while putting an end to all those pesky false-positives.

Please note that scanning for specific sites requires a membership. This is an exception, though. So, if you’re running a pay-per-use scan on these cottages, and want to silence alerts on #29, 38, and 39, let us know. Contact us via chat or email and we can help you with this via the backend.

Happy camping!

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