Road Trip Planning Tools

The Local Tourist
21 min readFeb 13

36 Best Road Trip Planning Tools

February 8, 2023 by Theresa Goodrich

Is a road trip in your future? These road trip planning tools will help you choose destinations, find a place to stay, get there, and so much more.

Beautiful view of the Pacific Coast

Planning a road trip is one of the most exciting parts of the experience. When you first decide to go on this adventure, you’re filled with anticipation and possibilities.

But it can also be overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you find interesting places? How do you keep everything organized?

Don’t fret; I’ve got you covered. I’ve found the best road trip planning tools to help make the process fun and easy.

I’m somewhat obsessed with road trips, and have written a few books about them (including Planning Your Perfect Road Trip) as well as dozens of articles.

With the help of the right road trip planning tools, you can make the process much simpler, more organized, and fun!

Below are some of the best road trip planner apps, websites, and real world tools to help you plan your next road trip. They’ll help you find great places to explore, figure out how to get there, and keep track of it all.

Ready to plan your next road trip?

36 Best Road Trip Planning Tools

There may be affiliate links in this post, which means we may get a small commission. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps keep TLT free. Everybody wins!

Before you go, check out this road trip packing list.

A stretch of the National Road in Illinois
A stretch of the Historic National Road in Illinois

Useful Websites for Road Trippers

There are approximately 1.3 gazillion travel websites, give or take a few bazillion. There’s no way to keep up with all of them. I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’ve curated some useful favorites.

The Local Tourist

Born to write with a nearly obsessive love of travel, history, cooking, Chicago, and my husband. Author, speaker, exuberant lover of life.