Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay—and if you know how to play your cards right, you can turn it into your best friend when it comes to road-trip planning. Using AI to plan a road trip can help you unlock customized routes and create a picture-perfect itinerary with minimal time and effort, allowing you to sit back, relax, and do the human part: enjoying the journey.
Why AI Is the Ultimate Road Trip Planning Tool
While paper maps and guidebooks ruled the day for decades, today, road trip planning is often best done with artificial intelligence. Especially if you’re planning a particularly long or complicated route, asking AI to help you build your itinerary can save you major time, and even more importantly, headaches. Instead of needing to do hours of research, AI road trip planning tools can scrape the entirety of the internet to help you plan smarter, faster—and in a way that’s totally personalized to your preferences.
Below, we’ll walk you through the basics of AI road trip planning, including a primer on how AM differs from older-school travel planning tools as well as how to use AI to uncover hidden gems, campgrounds you might otherwise have missed, and more. We’ll even include specific examples of AI prompts that can help you make your dream trip a reality. Let’s get going!
What AI Road Trip Planning Really Means
So when we say AI road trip planning, what are we talking about? We’re talking about using an AI chatbot or agent, like ChatGPT or Claude, to help you customize an RV road trip itinerary seamlessly and flexibly.
Here are some of the specific functions these LLMs (large language models) can serve when it comes to planning an RV trip:
- Generative AI can help you generate specific routes, nailing campgrounds, stops, and can’t-miss recommendations along the way
- Predictive AI, which is often built into apps these days, can help you stay ahead of weather, traffic, and timing
- AI-powered optimization tools help ensure you find the most efficient route, have enough fuel stops along the way to stay powered, and can even help you keep costs low
Keep in mind that when we talk about AI travel planning, we’re not just talking about traditional travel apps and GPS tools—though increasingly, those platforms have AI built in to help them make smarter recommendations. While you can take advantage of those opportunities as well, for this article, we’re specifically talking about asking a chatbot or agent how to plan your trip.
Using AI to Choose the Best Road Trip Route
When it comes to road-trip planning, the most important (and usually most fun!) thing to plan is the route itself. Your route is like the skeleton on which the rest of your trip will be built: where will you go? How will you drive there? Using AI can make it even more fun and flexible to answer these fundamental questions.
For instance, maybe you have a lot of different destinations on your bucket list—you want to see as many of the national parks as possible, for instance, or you’re interested in enjoying the Route 66 Centennial and want to see as much of it as possible in a short amount of time. You could explain the situation to an AI chatbot or feed it your list of destinations and ask how you can string together as many as possible in the time you have off—a week, for instance.
You can also go in more open-ended: tell AI your favorite hobbies, and it can suggest a vacation itinerary that will allow you to check many boxes. Explain your usual travel style (are you more of a slow, meandering type who likes lots of time to lounge or someone who wants to see as much as possible as fast as possible?). No matter your preferences, AI can suggest a route for you.
Once you have a basic sense of where you might be going, you can also use AI to dial down RV-specific routing conditions: use AI tools to ensure conditions like road grades, bridge heights, weight limits, and the width of the roads you’ll be traveling are all RV-friendly. (This is especially important if you’ll be traveling in the mountains!)
AI can also suggest alternative routes and contingency plans if one of life’s unexpected surprises, like emergent weather, crops up. The world is your oyster, here, both figuratively and literally.
Sample AI Prompt:
“Create a scenic RV-friendly road trip route from Denver to Moab, avoiding steep grades and low-clearance bridges.”
Finding Stops, Attractions, and Hidden Gems with AI
Okay, the itinerary is locked in. Now, time to find those hidden gems you would have otherwise driven right past without ever even realizing it.
If you explain your interests to your AI chatbot, it can help you identify nearby attractions along the way that fit into your ideal trip. Are you a foodie? Looking for family-friendly things to do? Obsessed with roadside attractions? A huge outdoors lover? Whatever it is, name it (along with your overall itinerary), and the AI chatbot can help you identify the coolest things to do along your route.
Insider tip: Sometimes, you’ll get the best tips by pushing back after the first response, which may be cursory or include only the most popular attractions you already know about. Ask the AI to drill even deeper to find the stuff that’s off the beaten trail.
You can also use AI to help you pace your trip, planning driving distances that will keep you moving but also relaxed and balancing sightseeing with rest days. (For instance, many RV travelers use the 3-3-3 rule, but AI could help you customize that guideline even further based on your needs!)
Sample AI Prompt:
“Suggest unique roadside attractions and short hikes along a 7-day road trip from Nashville to Asheville.”
Planning Campgrounds, RV Parks, and Overnight Stops with AI
The campgrounds you choose are your home away from home, and everyone has different needs when it comes to their ideal camp HQ. Maybe you’re into rugged, off-grid dispersed camping on BLM lands, or maybe you want a luxurious, resort-style experience with a clubhouse and programmed events.
Either way—you guessed it—AI has your back.
When you feed the AI chatbot your itinerary, it can suggest campgrounds, RV parks, and boondocking options along the way (and you can also tell it specifically which of those types of experiences you’re most interested in). You can also use it to filter for the amenities that are most important to you and your family, such as hookups, pet-friendly policies, and campgrounds that can accommodate bigger rigs if you’re traveling in a fifth wheel or Class A motorhome.
AI can give you the scoop on campgrounds near the national parks and other major attractions, and, again, can also help you plan the ideal travel days between multiple overnights.
Sample AI Prompt:
“Find RV campgrounds within 30 minutes of Yellowstone that can accommodate a 35-foot motorhome.”
Budgeting Your Road Trip with AI
It’s not everyone’s favorite topic, but for most RV travelers, it’s an important one: What’s the budget situation like? Whether you’ve got oodles of cash to spend on a glammed-up trip or are getting by on a shoestring budget, AI can help you put each dollar to its best use.
For example, AI can help you estimate your overall fuel costs or campground fee total, as well as alerting you to any tolls you might not have otherwise expected along the way. If you’re still deciding between two interesting routes or sets of destinations, AI can help you compare estimated trip costs to see which is most likely to fit in your budget.
If you give AI the total figure you want to spend, it can also help you break down a specific budget based on categories like food, fuel, campgrounds, and sightseeing. (Keep in mind, of course, that you can always push back or get more specific.) And since you can access AI anywhere you have an internet connection, you can also use it to adjust your budget mid-trip if something unexpected happens.
Sample AI Prompt:
“Estimate the total cost of a 10-day RV road trip through Utah hitting as many national parks as possible, including fuel, campgrounds, and food.”
Packing, Prep, and Safety Planning with AI
Let’s get down to logistics! AI can make the “nuts and bolts” part of road trip planning totally painless. Use AI to generate an RV packing list based on your destination and season so you won’t forget anything. Or generate an RV-specific prep checklist, which can help walk you step-by-step through things like hooking up to utilities in the campground or getting set with supplies.
Predictive AI can also help you know about weather changes, traffic jams, and other emergencies—often quickly enough to avoid them entirely. You can also use AI to plan rest stops and scope out safe overnight locations along the way (if you’re planning to stay in a parking lot for a night, for example, between two longer-stay campgrounds).
Sample AI Prompt:
“Create a packing checklist for a spring RV road trip through the Pacific Northwest—and tell me which stores will allow me to park in their lots for a night here and there.”
Best AI Tools for Road Trip and RV Planning
Chances are you already know about the major LLMs, like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. But these days, AI has been built into a variety of trip-planning apps and software, which can help make your RV road trip planning process that much easier. (You can also, of course, combine the following apps and programs with traditional apps, maps, guidebooks, and more.)
- You probably already know and love Roadtrippers, a time-honored road trip planning app that offers plenty of functionality specifically for RV trips and is now augmented with Autopilot™, its AI assistant
- AdventureGenie is another AI-powered trip planning app that has tools specifically for RVers, and which will generate an entire itinerary for you
- WeatherAI is a popular option for those looking to beef up their forecasts with predictive AI power, perfect for road tripping as well as simply planning for the weather at home
- And when it comes to traffic, these days, popular map apps like Google Maps and Waze both utilize AI to make their predictions more quick and accurate.
Of course, many of these apps have subscription plans or other pricing schedules, but you can do a lot of AI-powered planning totally for free (at least for now) using the major LLMs. Just remember: AI is wrong sometimes! No matter what you’re planning with AI, it’s always best to fact-check it before you take actions based on its predictions.
How to Write Better AI Prompts for Travel Planning
While AI does the major heavy lifting of planning, the part you’re responsible for—the prompt—is important, too. Writing quality prompts helps you get quality responses, and specificity makes a big difference.
When asking an AI chatbot for help planning your trip, be sure to include granular details such as your preferred travel style, the type of vehicle you’ll be traveling in, its size, your timeline, and your budget. And don’t be afraid to refine your result with follow-up prompts and pushback; often, the best responses come from deeper dives.
Keep in mind, too, that AI is a planning assistant, not a total replacement for the planning process. After all, your input and guidance is what’s going to make this vacation unforgettable, so don’t be afraid to deviate from AI’s direction if it better suits your needs!
Sample AI Prompts:
Instead of a vague prompt, like, “What is there to do in Arizona?” Make your prompt hyper-specific to get the best response. Try: “Plan a 5-day RV road trip through Arizona focused on easy hikes, scenic drives, and full-hookup campgrounds.”
Using AI During Your Road Trip
Like we said, you can access AI anywhere you can access the internet, which (likely) means you can use it during your road trip to handle any bumps or last-minute changes of plan along the way. For instance, AI can help you update your plans in real time based on weather and delays, alerting you to a fun side quest where you can while away the time the rest of the gang is sitting in traffic, for instance.
You can also use AI to find last-minute campgrounds or alternative stops, as well as for meal planning and grocery shopping (as well as budgeting around food). Say you find yourself in a quaint town by way of a quick rest stop: ask AI what’s the one thing a local would tell you to see before you left!
Let AI Be Your Road Trip Co-Pilot
AI can go a long way toward simplifying road trip and RV travel planning, and 38% of people are already planning an RV trip for the year ahead. Why not make the process easier from the very start? Combining technology with the freedom of the open road can truly help you unlock the very best our country has to offer—and traveling in an RVshare rental helps you do so in comfort and style. Happy travels!
