Great Walks 2023: DoC to stick with hut booking system, new June release date

God rays in the goblin forests on the Paparoa Track. Photo / Thomas Bywater

After Great Walk bookings were postponed by technical issues this week, the Department of Conservations says it will stick with its current IT vendor to reopen bookings in mid-June.

On Thursday DoC cancelled its planned release of huts on nine of the Great Walks after booking issues were flagged up at the last minute.

This came a week after the same booking website crashed under the weight of traffic on April 20, as 10,000 users tried to find places on the Milford Track.

The release for the 2023/24 season planned for Wednesday and Thursday was postponed indefinitely.

“We understand how much our incredible Great Walks network means to people, and how keen they are to book their spots. We are very disappointed with the issues experienced with our booking system and we’re working closely with our IT vendor to fix it,” said DoC’s director of heritage and visitors, Cat Wilson.

Wilson said the issue was a “new and specific fault linked to an availability search function”. The IT vendor would be using the time between now and June to review what changes had been made since last year’s hut allocation, which had taken place without issue.

The new dates for the Routeburn Track, Abel Tasman and other walks would be announced on May 31.

DoC payment problems

Trampers logging on to the DoC booking system on April 20 and 26 experienced multiple issues. Apart from hour-long outages and missing booking information, some were charged for dates without receiving bookings.

DoC’s booking services manager Cameron Hyland said they were aware of the issue and his team were manually processing refunds.

This was due to payments being taken by the ANZ gateway for bookings that could not be placed.

“We are at the mercy of bank processing times and while the refunds are generally processed quickly, the actual time frame depends on the customer’s bank.”

DoC said it had not taken any payments for unplaced bookings and that the fees would be released by the bank shortly.

“Given the frustration people had when booking the Milford Track on 20 April, my team is manually checking every single one of the transactions that were made that day – we expect to have that check completed tomorrow,” said Hyland.

DoC System Issues

The IT vendor which operates the Great Walks booking is the US-based government systems specialist USeDirect, owned by Tyler Technologies.

Initially the website outage on 20 April was presumed to be caused by the volume of people waiting to book places. However the company said it was made aware of the a “software issue” shortly after bookings opened for he Milford.

“The slowdown issue was detected, and quickly corrected within 60 minutes, and our support teams continued to monitor the situation through resolution,” the vendor said in a statement to trade publication Reseller News.

“We understand that the Great Walks are a popular experience for many people, and we apologise for the inconvenience.  We are working closely with our partner to ensure smooth bookings in the future.”

USeDirect has run the booking system since being awarded a five-year the contract with DOC in 2018, when the department invested $3 million in redeveloping the booking site.