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.

• Great Walk booking system crashes blamed on "function issue"
• Great Walk bookings cancelled as IT issue take DoC website offline

“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.