The citable version of how ItOpened scans, what it reads, what it can't do, and how every number on this site is produced.
📅 Updated Oct 30, 2026📡 2.5-minute watch cadence✅ Confirm-before-alert
The short version
ItOpened watches official booking calendars for openings and texts members when one appears. We never book, hold, transfer, or resell anything, and we never ask for your booking-site credentials or payment details. Your fee pays for monitoring — the booking is always yours, in your own account, at the normal price. Everything below is the long version, published so that members, journalists, and search engines can check our claims against our behavior.
Quick answers
How often does ItOpened check availability?
For campgrounds under active watch, our production scanner completes a full polling cycle every 2.5 minutes (150 seconds). In live operation on October 29, 2026, cycles hosting 50 facility-months (25 campgrounds × 2 months) finished in 8–20 seconds with zero fetch errors across 350+ fetches; the house watch registry has since grown to 100 campgrounds.
What data do you read?
The same public availability data the booking sites display to any visitor — for Recreation.gov properties, the availability responses behind the public calendar. Our directory of places is built from the official RIDB export published by Recreation.gov (export dated October 28, 2026): 3,651 recreation areas, 15,428 facilities, 5,804 campgrounds, 130,899 campsites.
How do you avoid false alerts?
Confirm-before-alert: when a poll detects a candidate opening, the scanner immediately re-fetches that facility-month and only alerts if the opening is still present in the confirmation snapshot. Candidates that fail confirmation are dropped silently.
What does one scan cover?
Polling is grouped by facility and month, not by member. A single availability response serves every watcher of that campground — so a thousand members watching Upper Pines cost the source the same one request as a single member, and the source is never hammered per-user.
What can't ItOpened do?
We cannot hold or book inventory, guarantee an opening will occur, or guarantee you'll win the race to book one. Some platforms cannot be watched at all — airlines publish no seat inventory, and some booking engines are account-gated or bot-walled. We label those categories honestly instead of selling coverage we don't have.
Category status, stated plainly
Category
Status
Basis
Federal campgrounds (Recreation.gov)
Live — scanning in production
Public availability data; live-tested Oct 29, 2026, with real confirmed openings (see the cancellation index)
National park lodges (Xanterra: Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier)
Readable — permission requested before production scanning
Booking API verified readable across 27 properties; the operator's terms require written permission for automated monitoring, so we asked
Tee times (GolfNow/TeeOff footprint)
Proven read — launch adapter in build
Live test Oct 29, 2026: real open slots and clean sold-out signals at TPC Sawgrass
Restaurants (Resy)
Adapter built — requires a first-party account decision
Venue resolution proven; availability requires a user auth token, so scanning runs under our own account or not at all
Disney dining & experiences
Not live — content and deadline coverage only
The most heavily defended booking environment we have tested; we do not sell Disney scanning we cannot demonstrate
Flights
Never
Airlines publish no public seat inventory to watch. Anyone selling 'sold-out flight alerts' is selling a fiction
How our statistics are produced
Every number on this site traces to a source we name on the page: the official directory record for a place; an official statistic (NPS, BLM) as published; or our own scanner logs. Our cancellation index republishes the scanner's confirmed-alert log with its exact date range and sample size stated — small samples are labeled small. We do not publish projections, estimates dressed as measurements, or testimonials we cannot point to. If we get a number wrong, we correct the page and note the correction.
What we never do
Book, hold, transfer, or resell inventory — in any category, ever.
Store members' booking-site passwords or payment credentials.
Promise an opening will occur, or that an alert guarantees a booking. Openings are first-come; speed is an advantage, not a certainty.
Poll a source faster because one member pays more, in ways that would burden the source — polling is per-facility, shared across watchers.
Present AI-generated or stock imagery as photographs of real places. Photography on this site is real, place-verified, and credited.
Sources
Recreation.gov RIDB full export (official directory), October 28, 2026.
ItOpened production scanner runbook and live health logs, October 29–30, 2026.
ItOpened feasibility reports: tee-time scanning (engine/golf), restaurant platforms, Disney and park-lodge probes, October 2026.
Every figure in this article traces to one of the sources above. If a number isn't sourced, we don't print it.