RV Trip Wizard Review (Plan an Epic Trip the Easy Way!)

What is RV Trip Wizard?

RV Trip Wizard is a trip planning tool that does everything you need to plan an awesome RV trip – map an RV safe route and find the best campgrounds, shopping, gas and stops along the way. RV Trip Wizard makes RV trip planning easy and fast. What’s more, your entire trip can be customized to your own personal travel style and RV size. You can set the filters to show your favorite campground amenities, membership clubs and even route preferences. To top it off, RV Trip Wizard keeps track of your trip cost too!

As a full time RVer, I have planned a lot of RV trips. Until now, I had not found a trip planner that really worked. Enter RV Trip Wizard – it does everything that I have been doing manually for years. And, it does it all in one place!

RV Trip Wizard is definitely worth the $59 per year. It is great for full timers, part timers and road trippers. We are now happily using it to plan all of our RV travels. And another thing, it creates a fantastic trip log! You can look back at your adventures and see where you stayed, the routes you took and the memories you made.

There is even a free 7 day trial so you can try out all the cool RV Trip Wizard features for yourself!

Sounds good right? So, let’s check out how RV Trip Wizard works and what makes it a fantastic RV trip planner.

How does RV Trip Wizard help you plan an RV trip?

RV Trip Wizard saves time.

RV Trip Wizard provides all the tools you need to easily plan an RV trip that is customized to your RV and travel style.

Have you ever started planning an RV Trip and found yourself jumping from the map, to campground reviews to a list of membership campgrounds? Then switching to a place to save your travel plans? It takes forever right? Well, RV Trip Wizard lets you do it all – in one place! You can map your route, find campgrounds, build your itinerary, read campground reviews and even add shopping, rest areas or attractions along the way. As a result, RV Trip Wizard saves a lot of time.

While you plan your trip, it’s easy to see your route, each overnight stay, and your daily driving distance. Exporting, emailing or sharing your trip in a variety of formats is easy too. Additionally, it is very intuitive to use, so you can jump right in and start planning your next RV trip.

See where your next stop should be at a glance!

As soon as you start planning your trip, you’ll know exactly where to zoom in and look for your next campground! How cool is that?

This is one of my favorite features! Here’s how it works. First, you add your preferred minimum, middle, and maximum daily driving distance (in miles) to your RV Trip Wizard settings. Then, as you plan, RV Trip Wizard overlays concentric circles on the map to tell you where your next stop should be! You can even set your driving distance radius to Classic (as the crow flies) or Advanced (actual driving distance).

Save money by prioritizing your RV membership club campgrounds.

RV Trip Wizard makes it simple to find membership campgrounds on your route. So, you can use the ones that save you the most money. As a matter of fact, there are two ways to do this; use the map filters to display your favorite RV clubs or simply rank your preferred campground memberships.

Rank your RV membership clubs and instantly find your favorites on the map.

One of the first things you’ll want to do is to rank your membership clubs in the order that you prefer. This tells RV Trip Wizard which icon to show on the map for a campground.

Let’s say, for example, you are a member of Thousand Trails, Passport America and Good Sam. Rank your memberships based on your nightly rates as follows:

1. Thousand Trails – $0 per night
2. Passport America – 50% off
3. Good Sam – 10% off

Now, imagine that a campground on your route is a Thousand Trails park and a Good Sam park. Since you have ranked Thousand Trails as your first choice, RV Trip Wizard will show the Thousand Trails icon for the park on the map. So you’ll not only know where all of your membership parks are along your route but also which membership will save you the most money at a particular park. Pretty sweet right?

Tip: If all of the icons on your map are the same green campground icon it is because you haven’t selected any preferred parks. To select and rank your preferred parks go to User, then Default Settings, then the Membership & Preferences tab.

Use filters to show only your membership parks.

Of course, there are times you only want to see specific membership club parks. After all, they can save you a lot of money. RV Trip Wizard filters make it effortless, simply choose the membership types to show. That’s it!

Easily customize your trip based on your travel preferences.

This is where RV Trip Wizard can really help you plan the best RV Trip for you based on your own camping style.

Love full hook up sites? Use the filters to show campgrounds that have full hookups. Want to go for a swim every afternoon? Set the filters to campgrounds with a pool. Prefer camping at State or National Parks? Yup, there are filters for that too.

See campground reviews, ratings and details right in RV Trip Wizard.

As you plan your trip, simply select a campground on the map to see its detailed information and reviews. Everything you need to know about the campground is right there! Reviews, hookup types, price range, amenities, wifi/data service availability, membership affiliations and even satellite maps. This is another feature that saves a lot of time!

When you select a park on the map, you’ll see a quick info box. It includes: the park rating and number of reviews, the mileage from your previous stop, the price range and all amenities. You can immediately add the park to your trip, see park details, or center it. Centering the park makes it the starting point for your daily driving distance radius so you can see how it fits in with the rest of your trip.

Want even more information about the park? Select park details and take a look.

What you’ll find when you open the park details box:

• RV Park info – address, phone number, website, number of sites and time zone.
• Membership affiliations.
• Satellite map link that takes you directly to a Google satellite map of the campground. This is very useful for looking at the park layout and surrounding neighborhood.
• Elevation.
• Features – amenities and wifi/cell data connectivity.
• Reviews – The first few reviews are right in RV Trip Wizard. If you’d like to view more, a single click opens the Campground Reviews page for the campground in a new window.
• Nightly rate paid by each reviewer.
• Photos – Any photos of the campground that have been added by reviewers.
• Tips from other RVers.
• Weather averages for the area.

Add a custom route or stop to your trip.

Let’s say, you want to stay overnight at a friend’s house or a Harvest Hosts location. All you need to do is enter the address in the search bar or right click on the map to add a custom stop to your trip.

Or maybe you just want to go your own way. For instance, if you want to avoid a city or check out the scenic route. Nothing to it. Just drag the route to the road you’d like to take.

RV Trip Wizard estimates your trip cost as you plan.

While you create your itinerary, RV Trip Wizard calculates your estimated costs for gas, camping, meals and miscellaneous expenses.

You can enter an average cost for each item that will be applied to each stop. Or, for a more accurate estimate, you can enter your specific costs for each stay.

Fuel cost is calculated using your route’s mileage and your vehicle’s MPG. Now you’re probably thinking: That’s great, but how am I supposed to know the price of gas in each area I travel through? Well, all you need to do is right click on the map and click Check Fuel Prices. Then, just like that, you’ll see current fuel prices for your fuel type at each gas station in the area. You’ll know which gas stations have the best price so you can save money on fuel too!

So, camping nightly costs and fuel prices are easily available in RV Trip Wizard. You’re on your own for meals and miscellaneous expenses though:)

See elevations and gradients along your route.

Now this is really cool! RV Trip Wizard shows you the elevations and road grades on your route. This is a big deal for RVers. It is also information that is oddly difficult to find outside of RV Trip Wizard. Encountering a very steep grade on a road trip in your car may be no big deal, but it can be another story entirely for a large RV.

Tip: Over a long trip the gradient shown may be fairly general. So, if you are concerned about a particular area, simply open up a new trip in a new window. Then map from point A to point B to get more detailed grade information over a shorter distance.

Map an RV safe route based on your RV size and weight.

RV Trip Wizard maps your route on roads that are safe for your RV size. This means you won’t need to worry about hazards like low bridges or steep mountain grades. Once you’ve entered your RV Info – height, length, weight and whether you carry propane – RV Trip Wizard does the rest.

And on top of that, it even tells you when to get gas along the way by using your vehicle’s gas tank size, reserve fuel capacity and MPG. Similarly, you have the choice to specify what type of roads to take or avoid.

A word of caution. We’ve probably all had GPS units or Google maps take us on some strange routes, so I’m not inclined to be too trusting of any mapping software. If you are traveling through any areas of concern in terms of route planning, it is a good idea to double check your route before hitting the road. Satellite, terrain, street view and Google Earth are great free tools for this. Also, if you are visiting a campground in a mountainous area ask if they recommend a specific route.

Export, share or send your itinerary to GPS.

There are lots of options to export and share your trips too! Print it. Email it. Export it to .XLS. Send it to a GPS or Google Maps. Share a link. Share a copy.

Need offline access to your trip? No problem, export or print it. Want to send it to a friend? Email your itinerary or share a link to your route map.

One of my favorite ways to export my itinerary is via email. The email includes a day by day itinerary with links to google maps, campground details and contact information for each stay. This is especially handy if you use a map app on your phone. You can just click the link to map to your campground.

Web based app allows access from any web browser.

RV Trip Wizard is web based so you can access and plan your trips from any device with a web browser. There is no need to install an application. Using a full sized screen to do some of my planning is a great option to have. It also works well and is easy to use on my phone. Here’s how it looks on a phone.

Easily locate Points of Interest along your route.

Of course, there‘s more to planning an RV trip than just campgrounds. For instance, sometimes you’ll want to find a rest area or gas station along your route. Or a Camping World. Maybe a Cracker Barrel for a quick overnight stay. Well, the RV Trip Wizard points of interest filters have you covered. There are over 57,000 points of interest so it’s simple to find exactly what you are looking for.

Great for planning a cross country trip and full-time RVers.

Above and beyond all of the features we’ve already looked at, RV Trip Wizard is extremely useful for planning a long RV trip. For example, the classic American cross country road trip! And of course, for full-time RVers. Here’s why:

First, you can add unlimited stops to your trips. This is awesome. Have you ever planned most of a trip only to find out you can’t add any more stops to the map? Yeah, well, that’s not so much fun.

Second, it’s easy to add, rearrange or remove stops. So, if you make it halfway through your trip, and want to take a detour, all you need to do is rearrange a night or two.

Third, you can copy your entire trip. So, let’s say you’ve planned part of a trip and there are two routes to your destination that you might want to take. Just copy your trip, so you can add stops and compare the routes. Then weigh the pros and cons of each choice, choose a route and off you go!

Keep track of all the neat places you find to check out on day trips.

Here’s a trick I use to keep track of all the sights I want to check out on our road trips.

Whenever I find a cool spot to visit near one of our stops, I add it to the comments field. So, when we arrive, I already have a list of places we’d like to see. Since you can add up to 7500 characters to the comments section there is plenty of room.

You can add day trips directly to your trip if you’d like to. I prefer to keep our RV travel days and routes separated from our day trips. It lets me easily review our RV travel routes and provides more flexibility to schedule our activities at each location. After all , a rainy day is great for a museum but not for a hike.

RV Trip Wizard is a great way to document your RV travels.

While I was planning several upcoming trips, I realized that I could use RV Trip Wizard to document our RV adventures. So I added all of our RV travels to RV Trip Wizard by year. I absolutely love how it turned out!

Now it’s simple to refer back to every route we’ve taken and every place we’ve stayed over the past 9 years! The best part is, all of my notes about each location and route are included for each stop in the trip. I’ve exported the trip to pdf, xls and email so I can look at our RV travel logs in RV Trip Wizard, in email or on my laptop.

Here’s how to do it. Create a new trip and name it. For example, Towing Home RV Travel Log 2021. Then start adding your travel routes, campground stays, costs and any notes. Before you know it you’ll be able to look back on all or your RV travels!

Is RV Trip Wizard Worth it?

Yes, absolutely. RV Trip Wizard includes all the tools you need to research and plan an epic RV journey! It’s a great RV trip planner for full-timers, part-timers and roadtrippers. RV Trip Wizard makes RV trip planning very easy and saves a whole lot of time in the process.

In addition to that, it helps you save money by prioritizing your RV membership clubs and locating the best gas prices on your route. As you plan, RV Trip Wizard estimates your expenses so you’ll have a good idea of how much your trip will cost before you leave.

To top it off, RV Trip Wizard plans an RV safe route so that you can relax and enjoy the adventure! Sharing your itinerary is easy too.

At $59 per year, RV Trip Wizard is definitely worth it. There is even a free 7 day trial so you might as well try it out for yourself. I’m betting you’ll love it:)

So, what’s stopping you? Save time, save money and plan an awesome RV trip that’s customized to your travel style!

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THANKS FOR READING!

We’ve been full-time RVers since 2012. Over 127,000 miles and 47 states later, we are still towing our home around the United States.

On TowingHome we share what we have learned along the way; what we love (and what we don’t) about the RV lifestyle, tips and tricks, our favorite campgrounds, places and gear.

We hope that it makes your journey a little bit easier.