Atlas Travel Guides

Trip Booking Deadline Tracker

Some trips are ruined months before you pack. Inca Trail permits, a Haleakala sunrise slot, a Rocky Mountain timed entry, an Angels Landing permit, a Manuel Antonio ticket: each has its own booking window, and some of them open and shut long before you would normally think about logistics. Put in your travel date, tick the destinations you are visiting, and this page lists every reservation we could verify from an official source, sorted by urgency. It shows when the window opens, whether it is open now, and whether you have already missed it. It also tells you where you need nothing at all, which is more often than most blogs admit.

Defaults to today. Change it to see what a window looked like on another date.

Where are you going? (leave all unticked to see everything)
Exchange rates used for the rough US dollar figures

Mid-market rates from Xe at about 14:55 UTC on 23 October 2026: US$1 = S/3.4414 = ₡456.24 = RD$61.32. Edit them if the rate has moved. Fees set in US dollars by the authority itself (US park and Costa Rican non-resident rates) are shown as dollars and are not converted.

The misconception that costs the most money

An America the Beautiful pass does not substitute for a timed-entry or vehicle reservation. The pass pays your entrance fee. A reservation is a separate booking on recreation.gov with its own processing fee, its own release date and its own sell-out risk. The National Park Service states on its entrance-passes page that reservations and timed entry are separate from the pass, and Haleakala states that fee-free entrance days do not include a sunrise reservation or admittance between 3 and 7 a.m. at all. People arrive at a gate holding an $80 annual pass and are turned around, because they bought the wrong thing. The same split applies in Puerto Rico in reverse: the El Yunque corridor needs no reservation and costs nothing, while El Portal charges $8 per person and your Interagency pass gets you the reduced $4 rate rather than free entry.

How the tracker works, and what it cannot do

Each reservation in the list carries a rule, not a hard-coded date, so the maths works for any travel date you type. There are four kinds of rule. A fixed number of days before covers most of them: Haleakala sunrise opens 60 days ahead at 7 a.m. HST with a second release two days out, the Cadillac Summit Road releases 30 per cent of its slots 90 days ahead and the other 70 per cent at 10 a.m. ET two days ahead, Pearl Harbor releases at 3 p.m. HST in two waves, eight weeks and 24 hours out, and Diamond Head, Haena and the optional El Portal tickets all run on 30 days. A monthly block covers Rocky Mountain, which releases the following month's timed entries at 8 a.m. MT on the first of the month, plus a further 40 per cent at 7 p.m. MT the night before each date; its first block, 22 May to 30 June, all goes on sale on 1 May, which the tool accounts for. A lottery calendar covers Angels Landing, whose seasonal lottery opens on the 1st, closes on the 20th and issues permits on the 25th of January, April, July and October for the following three-month block; miss it and your only route is the day-before lottery, open 12:01 a.m. to 3 p.m. MT with results after 4 p.m. A rolling sale covers Machu Picchu, the Peruvian climbing routes, the Inca Trail and the Costa Rican parks, where there is no release date to wait for because tickets are already on sale and the constraint is the daily cap.

Assumptions, stated plainly

Prices shown are the non-resident adult rate, since residents of Hawaii, Costa Rica and Peru pay far less and carry ID to prove it. Season dates, where a reservation applies only part of the year, are the most recent published ones and are labelled with their year: Rocky Mountain ran 22 May to 18 October 2026 and Acadia 20 May to 25 October 2026. Several large parks decided against reservations for 2026 and may reinstate them, so a 2027 trip needs a fresh look at the park's own page in the winter before you go. The urgency sort puts a closed lottery first, then one closing within a fortnight, then anything open where the inventory is probably already thin, then open windows, then windows that have not opened, then the things that need no booking at all.

Not covered

No live availability, no booking, no accounts. Flights, hotels, trains to Aguas Calientes, rental cars, restaurants and guided tours are outside the scope, and so are campgrounds and backcountry wilderness permits, which run on their own calendars. We do not publish a figure we could not verify from an official page: Monteverde does not list its admission price on its own visit page, so none is shown, and Samana whale-watching boat prices and the sanctuary permit fee are not stated anywhere official that we could read. Anything we could not confirm is written up in the research note linked below, with its sources.

Data last verified 2026-10-23. Prices, hours and rules change; confirm with the official source before you go.

Sources

Related guides

Frequently asked questions

Does an America the Beautiful pass cover a timed-entry reservation?

No, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in US national park planning. The pass covers the entrance fee. A timed-entry or vehicle reservation is a separate booking on recreation.gov, with its own small processing fee, and it can sell out while you hold a perfectly valid $80 pass. The National Park Service says so directly on its entrance-passes page: reservations are "separate from the pass". Haleakala goes further and states that fee-free entrance days do not include sunrise reservations or admittance between 3 and 7 a.m. at all.

Which US national parks actually need a reservation right now?

Fewer than the internet suggests. For the 2026 season Glacier, Yosemite, Mount Rainier and Arches all ran without vehicle or timed-entry reservations, and Yellowstone and Grand Canyon state they do not require them. The ones that did require a booking were Rocky Mountain (timed entry, $2), Acadia for the Cadillac Summit Road only ($6), Zion for the Angels Landing chains only (a permit lottery) and Haleakala for sunrise ($1). Parks re-decide each winter, so the tool labels these as the 2026 position and tells you to re-check for your year.

How far ahead do Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail sell out?

Machu Picchu entry tickets are sold on a rolling basis through the Ministry of Culture portal tuboleto.cultura.pe, so the window is already open for your date. The constraint is the daily cap, reported as 5,600 visitors on designated peak dates in 2026 and 4,500 on other days, and the add-on climbing routes (Huayna Picchu, Machu Picchu Mountain, Huchuy Picchu) go first. Inca Trail permits are issued in your name through a licensed operator and routinely sell out several months ahead for the dry season. We could not confirm the exact release date for the following year on an official page, so book the operator as early as you can rather than waiting for a date.

Do I need a reservation for El Yunque in Puerto Rico?

No. The USDA Forest Service states that entrance to the El Yunque recreational corridor on PR-191 North in Rio Grande is free and no reservations are required, with the corridor open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The recreation.gov corridor reservation that ran from 2020 is suspended. Capacity is managed through parking instead, so arrive early. The El Portal Rainforest Center is different: it charges $8 per person ($4 with an Interagency pass) and sells optional advance tickets on recreation.gov released 30 days ahead at 9 a.m.

What does this tool not tell me?

It does not check live availability, book anything, or know about the hotels, flights, trains, rental cars and restaurants on your trip. It also cannot see 2027 season dates that the parks have not announced yet, so where a season or release calendar is shown it is the most recent published one and is labelled with its year. Treat every date as a prompt to open the official link and confirm, not as a guarantee.