Years ago in Texas I wrote a simple selenium webdriver script to check on the status of available camp spots in a popular state park and notify me when one became available. Kind of a last ditch effort to camp as people would book months ahead of time but would sometimes cancel their reservation when they realized they can’t make it. I think they’d do it before their small deposit became non-refundable.
The alternative of manually checking every day would have likely resulted in never getting a spot. I was using my skills to hack together a solution for myself in a crappy situation.
This was pretty much my experience as well: had to build a small scraper 2 years ago to alert me whenever spots for camping became available in Yosemite. Bear in mind that this was around 3-4 months in advance. Just for the sake of it I let it run after we had the spots, to understand how many people cancelled, and the amount of cancellations are actually insane.
While I don't think my approach was too harsh (I wasn't constantly querying nor booking automatically), it could be solved if they provided their own alert system, or discourage the book-cancel behaviour (higher cancel fees? Might not make much sense since the camping itself is pretty cheap...)
The alternative of manually checking every day would have likely resulted in never getting a spot. I was using my skills to hack together a solution for myself in a crappy situation.