A Canadian-run website is assisting New Zealand trampers to book their Great Walks.

Schnerp scans reservation websites like DOC’s Great Walk site, and notifies users the moment a spot opens up.

Canadian software engineer Daniel Thareja created Schnerp in 2022 to help people book adventures in his home country. 

Based in Canmore in the Canadian Rockies, Thareja was keen to visit Lake O’Hara, Canada’s Milford Track equivalent. But when Parks Canada launched its booking system the queue reached 60,000, with users refreshing the page until someone cancelled their spot. 

Using his coding background, Thareja wrote a script that watched the Parks Canada page and emailed him when a spot opened up. Eventually, he was on his way to Lake O’Hara. Schnerp has now sent more than 1.5 million notifications to tens of thousands of campers.

The service expanded into New Zealand this year after a chairlift conversation with a Kiwi. “He told me about how crazy hard it is to book a Great Walk,” Thareja said. “I went home and looked into it, and saw that it was exactly the same problem as Parks Canada.”

Success stories are already flowing in. Sarah Carstens got her whole group onto the Heaphy after forgetting to book the last hut, and Hamish Duff locked in Paparoa for Easter after Schnerp scanned for him over 5000 times.

These days, Thareja doesn’t even try to book in Parks Canada’s opening week. “The queue’s brutal, and work always gets in the way. I’ve learned to trust the cancellations.”