Best Road Trip Planner - Apps You Need For Your Road Trip
Jin - January 15, 2021
Are you planning a road trip? Perfect! Read on to learn all about the best apps available to help you before, during, and after your travel extravaganza. This blog post is separated into a few sections related to the different aspects of road tripping:
- Planning (Roadtrippers, Pebblar, Blue Planit, My Scenic Drives, Rand Mcnally TripMaker)
- Safety (BSafe, Geosure)
- Gas (GasBuddy)
- Expenses (TravelSpend)
For the TLDR of this post, scroll all the way down.
Trip Planner Apps
Going on a great road trip requires at least a little planning. I’ve scoured the web and reviewed a few of the best road trip planner apps that help you find things to do, plan your route, and organize your itinerary. Each of the apps have their advantages and disadvantages and depending on your specific needs, different ones will work for you.
1. Let’s first take a look at the Roadtrippers app.
Pros:
This a popular app that allows you to search for things to do, places to see, etc. These events are rated by Roadtrippers users so you can get a sense of how good the events are.
The user interface is easy to use and intuitive.. You can easily plan your trip, save your events, and see all the pertinent info like distance between locations, approximate gas costs, destination information, and more.
Currently rated 4.7 stars with 36k+ reviews on the app store, Roadtrippers is the only app out of the list that also has a well made mobile app so you can plan on the go and refer to your itinerary without opening your computer.
Cons:
As of this writing, the free version of the app only allows you to add 7 waypoints to your itinerary. In order to unlock the full functionality of the app you need to shell out $30 per year.
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2. Next, let’s take a look at Pebblar and, our very own, Blue Planit.
Pebblar’s Pros:
Pebblar is not an app that is specifically only for planning road trips but definitely works for that purpose and more. It has a slick and sleek user interface and is intuitive to use, requiring little learning. You are able to share and edit your trip with friends.
Pebblar’s Cons:
As of this writing, Pebblar is not free after an initial trial period. They charge per itinerary ($10) and allow you to buy a subscription to use their app which is $9.95 per month. After paying, you are able to print your itinerary.
Blue Planit’s Pros:
You can plan road trips on the free Blue Planit app as well. With an easy to use drag and drop itinerary interface, map view, a packing list, and capability to add favorite points of interest, Blue Planit is comprehensive in its function as a trip planner.
Also, you can discover what other trip planners are doing and where they’re going. Like their trip? Copy it to make it yours and start planning from there. We’re a growing community and you can join to be a part of it. Sign up to start planning for free!
Blue Planit’s Cons:
Blue Planit is constantly improving. We are laser focused on removing as much friction as possible and making the feel, look, and interface of the app as delightful as possible. Try out the demo here.
3. Lastly, we have 2 completely free planner apps that all have very similar functionality.
The apps are My Scenic Drives and Rand Mcnally TripMaker. I’ll just lump them together since they are fairly similar.
Pros:
These 2 apps get the job done. They allow you to add things that you want to do along the way and give some suggestions and recommendations as well. You can do alot of planning and information organizing with them.
My Scenic Drives is the most minimalistic of the 2. Minimal information is shown until you manual click something to see it. It keeps you from being overloaded with text, numbers, and markers.
TripMaker has the better recommendations system and allows you to search for points of interest based on a radius from your driving route.
Both apps allow you to print out and/or share your itinerary for free.
Cons:
The user interface and experience of these apps are not the greatest. My Scenic Drives feels old like it was made in the early 2000s and although TripMaker is slightly better, there are still some aspects to it that are not completely intuitive.
Neither of these apps have a community associated with it. You don’t get recommendations from fellow road trippers. For the recommendations you do get, they aren’t rated in any way so you don’t know how good that recommendation is.
As far as the planning process goes, I’ve introduced 5 apps that all serve you differently. Each has their merits so choose the one that best fits your planning style! However, I would highly recommend you trying our Blue Planit trip planning app for your next road trip.
Safety Apps
These 2 mobile apps will allow you to maximize your safety while being on a road trip.
Geosure:
Geosure is an app that assesses locations based on their safety conditions including violence, property loss, basic freedoms, and more. The app establishes a safety score that measures safety on an objective level.
You can also share your own personal safety experience in locations that you’ve visited. Crowdsourcing the safety experiences makes the app community-based and dynamic allowing it to update accurately with time.
As of this writing, the app has a 4.6 star rating on the app store.
BSafe:
The Bsafe app utilizes GPS to allow your security network (friends and family) to track you live on a map. This is useful potentially when driving places, hiking, or otherwise when arriving at specific destinations at a specific time is expected.
Gas App
There’s only one option that helps you save on gas during a road trip and that app is called GasBuddy. Currently, this app has over 370K ratings on the app store and has a 4.7 star rating. 90 million people are using the app. What does it do?
It offers savings at the pump in multiple ways. First, it’ll tell you the cheapest stations to get gas as you are driving on your road trip. Also, you can get the free GasBuddy fuel card and save up to 25 cents per gallon of gas.
Also community-based, you can report gas prices to let fellow road trippers know about the latest deals.
Finally, you can use your in app points obtained by doing challenges to win a $100 gas gift card that can go directly to funding your road trip.
This app is a must have when road tripping if you want to save some money.
Expense Tracking App
GasBuddy has a trip calculator that helps you estimate how much it’ll cost to go from point A to point B. However, for a more comprehensive context so that you can track and budget your road trip, there are many great apps to do this. One that sticks out is TravelSpend.
The free app allows you to track your expenses when traveling, taking photos, categorizing your costs and making sure you’re on budget.
You can share and sync the data with friends and family and organize your budget together in real time.
One really cool feature is that you can split your costs when traveling in a group. You can track who owes whom, never have any confusion, or do the math on your own again.
TLDR:
There are many road trip planner apps that will help you prior to the rubber meeting the road. Planning apps are a dime a dozen but a few that are highlighted in this post are Roadtrippers and Pebblar, which charge for full functionality of the apps. Blue Planit, My Scenic Drives, and TripMaker are free planners that work great as well.
Apps that help you stay safe and provide up-to-date, safety-related information on your road trip include BSafe and Geosure.
Gas is an important expense on your trip and there’s only one app that will minimize your spending in this area and that’s GasBuddy.
Finally, need to track your spending on your trip? TravelSpend does just that while providing a great mobile app user interface.
If you’re looking to plan any travel, road trip, international, domestic, space, whatever, I would highly recommend you check out the Travel Mapper Google Sheets add-on. Let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks and safe travels!
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You can try Travel Mapper for free and get 10% off using coupon code CDQOAIGZ! Check out this video to see all the features in action:
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