How to Plan a Road Trip

The experience of going on a road trip is hard to beat: You are free to go wherever roads can take you, and you can explore places you couldn’t reach by train or bus. You can easily adjust your itinerary, and you can spontaneously decide to stay a bit longer or leave earlier than planned, depending on how much you are vibing with a place. Plus you usually save a lot of money by carrying your accommodation with you – be it your campervan or the tent in the back of your car.

Vanlife, the pandemic and the hassle of planning

The independence you get from traveling in your van or with your car is also a great advantage during the current pandemic. There is probably no safer way right now than road tripping. You can get to your destination without spending hours on a train or plane with lots of other people. If the situation surrounding COVID changes in your planned destination, your flexibility allows you to go elsewhere. Plus, on a road trip, you are pretty much self-sufficient and can avoid bumping into other people, other than at gas stations or the supermarket (which you’d have to frequent if you stayed at home, too).

We loved our road trips in Sweden and Corsica last year and can’t wait to do more in 2021. The only caveat: While we love researching which places we want to visit, planning the actual road trip route can be complicated and painful. Apps like Google Maps or Apple Maps might be useful for many things but aren’t specifically designed with road trip planning in mind, so they’re not great for displaying and organizing routes with many stops. Plus, they won’t let you edit your saved route later – all that flexibility mentioned above is out the window.

We present: Our new road trip planner Roadie

We built TravelSpend when we couldn’t find a painless way to track our spendings and stick to a budget when traveling. When we struggled with planning our road trips, we thought: why not build a helpful tool for this ourselves, too? And that’s what we did. Our brand new road trip planner app Roadie makes it easy and fun to plan road trip routes. It has all the functions we were missing in other apps:

Plan multi-stop routes

Make your itinerary using the interactive Roadie map by searching for places and adding them to your route. You can reorder or delete these route stops easily at any point.

Keep track of distances and driving times

Roadie calculates routes between your waypoints for you and shows you driving times and distances between multiple stops. This helps you plan your time on the road, including your gas and fuel consumption. Plus, you’ll know how to space out your bathroom and snack breaks.

Mark your favorite places

Do your research on the region you’d like to discover and mark all the places you’re interested in seeing – national parks, monuments, restaurants. No need to add them to a route as waypoints straight away. This allows you to get an overview and plan your route to hit as many of your dream stops as possible. Plus, you’ll have great alternatives if you change your mind later and want to change your route or add extra stops.

Manage multiple trips at once

For dedicated road trippers like us, the ability to store and manage numerous routes with many stops each was vital. This way, you can simultaneously plan various trips. Because the end of one road trip is just the start of planning the next adventure!

Export, import, and share

As seasoned travelers, we know how important it is to better be safe than sorry and have backups for everything. That’s why Roadie lets you export and import routes. And if you’re planning to have your adventure with friends, we’ve made it easy to share your route with your travel companions.

Made by roadtrippers for roadtrippers

Our experiences with planning road trips and being on the road taught us which features you really need to plan a road trip smoothly. We managed to incorporate all the functions we missed in other apps and put them in a clean and straightforward design. Roadie is easy to use both by experienced road trippers and people that are new to road trips. We’re convinced that you won’t find a better design and fairer pricing in any other route planning app.

We don’t like to toot our own horns too much, but we’re thrilled with our new app. And the great feedback we have received so far from our first users, and the good ratings on the App Store prove us right! Why don’t you give it a try yourself and plan your next adventure with Roadie?

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