You’ve spent the past two months dreaming about this vacation. Make the most of your hard-earned time off by utilizing these 9 RV travel apps and websites. With their guidance, you’ll become an expert RV trip planner with the adventures to prove it.
Planning Your Route
There are 46,876 miles of interstate in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. How will you ever decide where to go? Roadtrippers is a multi-featured tool for desktop and mobile. Input a departure point and destination, and Roadtrippers will help fill in the details with a user-friendly map. If you’re completely overwhelmed by your options, this RV trip planner offers trip guides to get you started.
Finding a Campground
Sure, you can spend the night in a Walmart or Lowes parking lot. But why would you want to? Public lands belong to all Americans, and many offer peaceful and beautiful places to stay overnight with an RV. Browse Campendium on desktop or mobile, where you’ll find a wealth of campground reviews and photos. Filter by price, type of hookups, and category (national forest, state park, private RV park, etc.).
Finding Fuel
When your RV holds 75 gallons of gas, the price per gallon matters. Use GasBuddy, on desktop or mobile, to find the cheapest gas or diesel on your travel route. Gas type can be sorted by grade, and you can see when each price was last updated (recent updates are always the most trustworthy).
Finding Activities
You didn’t drive across the country to put up your feet and watch Netflix, so now’s the time to plan your activities! There are a wealth of RV trip planner tools to use, but three of our favorites are Chimani National Parks, AllTrails, and TripAdvisor.
The Chimani National Parks app takes your location and displays all the National Park Service sites in your area. You can sort by site type (national park, national recreation area, parkways, etc.) and even save your route in the trip planner. Well-known parks like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon are must-sees, but sites off the beaten path are also full of history and natural beauty.
Continue your adventures outdoors with AllTrails. Available on desktop and mobile, this RV trip planner resource offers more than 50,000 trail maps, driving directions, and the ability to save your favorites. If you’re traveling with little ones, don’t forget to look at trail length, difficulty, and elevation change.
Last but not least, it’s tough to beat TripAdvisor for its comprehensive, user-sourced guide to activities around the nation. Sort activity ideas by rating and read reviews from actual visitors. If you create a free account on desktop or mobile, you can create lists to save the places that stand out to you.
Finding Food
One of the best parts of RV travel is the ability to cook breakfast a few feet away from your bed. But sometimes you want to explore the surrounding area by tasting its cuisine. When that happens, we recommend you use Yelp and TVFoodMaps.
On desktop or mobile, Yelp is arguably the best review tool for finding the top-rated restaurants in your area. Pro tip: in the filter section, sort by “Rating” instead of the default “Best Match.” You may have to drive a bit farther, but it will almost always be worth it. You can also select “Open Now,” since some of the best boutique eateries are only open for lunch or dinner.
Have you ever salivated while watching Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins & Dives”? If so, TVFoodMaps will be your new best friend. Use it to find restaurants that have been featured on popular food shows like “Man vs. Food” and “Chopped.” Available on desktop and mobile.
Finding Cell Coverage
No matter how much of an RV trip planner you are, there will always be things you need to look up on the go. Make sure you’ll have cell coverage for those last-minute Google searches by downloading the Coverage? app on your phone. This is the only paid app on our list, but the $2.99 is worth it. Zoom in to any area of the country to see whether it has AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and/or Verizon service. Fulltime RV travelers use Coverage? all the time and have impressive things to say about its reliability.
You’re on Your Way to Becoming an Expert RV Trip Planner
You don’t have to feel overwhelmed about planning your next RV road trip. With the help of these 9 websites apps, get ready to have your best vacation ever.