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RV trip planner: what the four jobs need, and the apps that do them

An RV trip is four decisions, not one: a route that suits the height and weight of the RV, a campsite that fits, a fuel stop you can leave, and an overnight stop that is legal. No single app does all four, so the working setup is a small stack of two or three, and three of the apps that used to cover this ground are gone.

By OriginRV. Last updated on Oct 3, 2026.

The short version: an RV trip is four separate decisions, and no single app makes all four. Route with a planner that knows your height and weight, find sites with Campendium or The Dyrt, book federal land through Recreation.gov, and use Open Roads for diesel. Google Maps has no RV profile at all, and three of the apps that once covered this ground are gone.

Why one app cannot plan the whole trip

The four jobs look like one job from the driver's seat, and they are not. Each needs a different set of data, and each of those sets goes stale on its own schedule.

  • The route needs clearances, weight limits and grade data, because a road that is fine in a car can put a bridge through your roof.
  • The campsite needs site length, hookup type and pet rules, which come from the campground rather than from a map.
  • The fuel stop needs a lane you can enter and leave with a trailer attached, which is a property of the station, not the highway.
  • The overnight stop needs a legal status, and that changes by city, by store manager and by season.

That is why the field has consolidated into bundles rather than into one app. Most RVers end up running two or three of them at once, and no single product on the market answers all four questions.

The route has to fit the RV, and Google Maps does not know that

Google Maps has no RV profile. That is not a setting you have missed: large vehicle routing exists inside Google's Routes API, which is a tool for developers building fleet applications, not a feature of the consumer app. A request has to set the travel mode to truck and pass the vehicle's height, weight and length, and Google states the feature is "available to a limited set of customers" who have to request provisioning for it. It covers the contiguous 48 states, plus Japan as an experimental feature, and it does not cover Alaska, Hawaii or the territories.

Google is also direct about what the output is worth: "Drivers must not rely solely on routes returned by this API to be safe or legal. Routes are not guaranteed to be appropriate for the vehicle, and following them may expose drivers to hazards such as low bridges or roads where large vehicles are prohibited." The API can also return a best effort route that still crosses a restricted road, and it flags that case rather than refusing.

So RV-safe routing is a paid feature of the RV planners rather than something you get free from a map app, and the limits they route on are not identical.

What RVers route and plan with

RV LIFE Trip Wizard. The established paid planner, at 65 dollars a year. It routes to the height and weight of your RV and avoids low clearances, steep grades and propane restrictions, which is the specific thing a car navigation app cannot do. It carries over 20,000 campgrounds and over 57,000 points of interest, and it runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install or update.

Roadtrippers. The general road trip planner that absorbed the RV stack when Roadpass merged its products. It now includes RV routing that avoids low overhead clearances and propane restrictions, up to 150 stops in a trip, and the overnight parking database that used to be a separate app.

Campendium. Free to browse and the strongest of the tools on dispersed and free camping, with campground reviews and cell signal reports. The paid tier adds RV-safe navigation and trip planning, and CAMPalerts will text you when a sold out site opens up.

The Dyrt. The review side of camping, covering public, private and free sites. It is the tool to reach for when the question is whether a specific campground is any good rather than where it is.

Where the overnight stop comes from

Federal land is booked through Recreation.gov, which is where the national parks, national forests and most federal campgrounds live. It carries 31.5 million registered accounts and more than 5,800 locations, and it ran nearly 11 million reservations in a single year. If your trip involves a national park, this is the booking system, and it is the one place where planning early actually changes the outcome.

For everything else, Campendium covers free and dispersed camping, and Roadtrippers carries a database of more than 16,000 free overnight parking locations across the United States and Canada. Both are worth reading before you drive, and neither is worth trusting blind on the night: overnight parking rules are local, they change, and a database that was right last season can be wrong this one.

Fuel is a separate app, and the discounts are diesel only

Open Roads is a diesel discount program, and it is free to join. It advertises 40 to 50 cents off per gallon at participating stations, lets you pay at the pump, and gives you access to the truck lanes, which is the part that matters when you are 13 feet tall and towing. The card carries a 200 gallon per day limit.

Read the fine print on that one if you drive a gas motorhome: this is a diesel program. The fuel discount market is built around heavy vehicles, and the savings largely are not there for gasoline.

The RV apps that stopped working

Three of the tools that used to do this work have gone, and it is worth knowing which before you pay for a subscription.

  • RVillage was the RV social network, and it closed on March 31, 2023. Roadpass, which owned it, told members that "the time has come for us to say goodbye to RVillage" and pointed them at a Facebook group instead. Its founder had reported more than 300,000 active consumers in October 2020.
  • Togo RV is no longer a separate app. Its features, including the RV-friendly GPS and the overnight parking database, were folded into Roadtrippers.
  • Ultimate Public Campgrounds is no longer sold as an app; its developer, William Modesitt, confirmed that it had gone and that the data had been taken over by Garmin. The dataset now arrives as built-in content on Garmin's Tread and Overlander devices, documented in Garmin's own manuals.

The pattern is worth understanding before you pay for anything: two of them were retired by the company that owned them and the third had its data taken over by a hardware maker. Before buying a year of any RV tool, check that the product still exists and that the data behind it is still being maintained.

A planning order that holds up

  1. Set the route first, with real numbers. Height and weight, loaded, not from the brochure. Everything downstream depends on roads the RV can actually use.
  2. Pick campgrounds by site, not by name. Site length and hookup type decide whether you fit, and a campground that takes a 25 foot trailer may have nothing for a 40 foot fifth wheel.
  3. Book federal land early. Recreation.gov inventory is released on a schedule, and popular parks fill the day it opens.
  4. Plan the fuel stops for access. A truck lane you can pull through beats a cheaper station you have to back out of.
  5. Check the overnight stop the night before. Local rules and store policies change faster than any app updates, and a phone call settles it.

What the paid tiers are actually for

Almost everything in this list has a free tier that is genuinely usable. The paid tiers buy two things: RV-safe routing on height and weight, which is the feature that does not exist for free anywhere, and offline maps for the stretches where there is no signal.

Against that, a year of the main planner costs less than one night at a commercial campground. If your RV is tall or heavy, the routing alone is worth it. If you tow a small trailer and stay on interstates, the map app you already have will get you most of the way, and the free tools will do the rest.

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