RV Trip Planning

[kwthere]

For about a year, I have been using RV Trip Wizard (https://www.rvtripwizard.com/) to help me plan my adventures.
The program is online - you input your RV stats; desired daily drive time or miles, estimated fuel mileage - etc. As you map your trip, campsites come up - commercial RV campgrounds, BLM sites, National & State Park and even city and county RV sites. When you click on a site, it gives information about the site.
You can specify the number of nights you plan to stay at each site.
At the completion, it tallies total miles, total drive time, fuel and estimated expenses.
It is a great program - that I recommend for serious cross county travel. It does require an annual subscription.

 

[Jim Bennett]

It sounds like it has some good benefits, though it is a shame that there is no phone app, as I often do not have connectivity. Are you able to plan as you go as I rarely set up reservations ahead?

 

[kwthere]

What I have done in the past, is from the RV wizard program, print a one or two page summary of my trip. The summary gives me a day by day Mileage, driving time, destination (With the contact information for the destinations). If the contact information includes a phone number, while on the road I will call ahead for a reservation (if needed). Each day, I would generally input the destination into my Garman GPS. .

 

[CADreamin]

I've looked at Trip Wizard before but it's been a while so I just took another look. Wanting to see some reviews, I found this YouTube video

. One thing I learned from the video is that the company that owns RV Trip Wizard also owns other RV sites -- go to 7:59 on the video and you'll see one we all know and love.

 

[padlin]

For a freebie, RV Parky works fine but may not have as many bells and whistles.

Synced pc and phone app. If you use it, do try the filters.

I've even been adding in places I want to try for lunch stops. Researching good local spots, nice to do way ahead of time at home on the laptop.

 

[Jim Bennett]

What I have done in the past, is from the RV wizard program, print a one or two page summary of my trip.

This would be a problem for us as we don't bring along a printer. We mostly use our phones and I see the site is formatted well for that.

 

[Jim Bennett]

For a freebie, RV Parky works fine but may not have as many bells and whistles.

Synced pc and phone app. If you use it, do try the filters.

I've even been adding in places I want to try for lunch stops. Researching good local spots, nice to do way ahead of time at home on the laptop.

Another free one that gives similar results with similar filters is ParkAdvisor.

Planning ahead at home? That is way more organized than I ever hope to be. My strategy is to just keep pointed in the direction we want to go, then look for options along the way with the app.

This year in the 2 1/2 months on the road we only hit 3 places in Arizona where things were full or close to it. Lost Ductchman we decided to skip, though they said we could possibly get in the overflow, and went to Lake Pleasant where there were a couple free spots, and for that weekend we just moved to their random camping spots which were just fine but without services. At Dead Horse Ranch State Park we camped in the Group/Overflow again (where we met you last year), actually preferring it being $20/night (as opposed to $35 with water and electric) with great sites and full washroom facilities.

 

[Chama]

I use RV Trip Wizard to plan all our trips. Our trips are usually 2 months or longer with 20 or more stops, covering 3000 miles or more. RV Trip Wizard is indispensible for us. We didn't used to do as much reservation-making in past years but we are finding many RV, State and National parks in desirable locations are now often completely full. Making reservations at those parks now seems to be a requirement given the number of RVers on the road. RV Trip Wizard greatly simplifies the planning and reservation making tasks. I do wish there was an Android version available. Also I am unable to get the Export to Calendar function to work with Google Calendar. I do export the trip file to Excel and print it out before we leave home. All in all, I like it a lot and consider it money well spent.