As full-time RVers, we look for the best deals on campgrounds, and that usually comes through RV memberships. Let’s look at 6 of the most common RV memberships and their pros and cons.
The RV lifestyle sounds so fun and exhilarating at first when you start thinking about the idea of traveling all the time and working from anywhere you feel like.
But it quickly sets in as you book your first voyage that campsites can add up quickly. With no discounts, you can easily spend upwards of $450/week on campsites. That’s why we bought RV memberships to help keep us on budget.
Before we dive into what we did and didn’t like about the RV memberships we bought, I just want to quickly address what you may hear from a segment of the full-time RV life crew. You’ll often hear, “if you want to save money, just boondock!” Boondocking is a term referring to living in your RV with no hookups – no water, electric or sewer.
For a lot of people, that works great. For us, our rig isn’t set up with what we need to boondock for weeks at a time while still working and needing reliable utilities. We’d need thousands of dollars worth of solar panels and hookups to support our wifi and electricity needs for work, plus a $1,000 composting toilet and other modifications that allow people to live off grid comfortably.
For us, we like full hookups – so back to the top…that’s why we buy RV memberships.
Let’s discuss the RV memberships we’ve tried and what we like about each.
For us, we paid $7,200 for the Basic Upgrade in one lump sum from the proceeds of our house sale, and continue to pay $77/mo for the annual charges.
Thousand Trails is often described in the RV world as “golden handcuffs”.
On one hand, it’s the most cost-effective RV membership out there, but on the other hand – well, see the Cons list above.
Every time we want to swear off Thousand Trails on principle alone, we just can’t.
Think of it this way – you pay $960 for as much camping as you want for the entire year. If you use your membership for 3 weeks(ish), you’ve already paid for the membership and everything after that is just gravy.
For us, we use Thousand Trails for about 4 months of the year. That means we pay for about 3 weeks and get the rest “free”.
Worth it? For us, yeah.
Good Sam is well worth its value. We’ve used the discount at Camping World (they give you a $10 store voucher), at the pump (every savings helps), and, obviously at campgrounds.
We haven’t even touched all the other ways it can save you money!
Overall, this is what we’d call a no-brainer “yes”.
Passport America, though it has a lot of “blackout dates”, is definitely still worth it. If you can use it on even one 2-day trip/stay, you’ll make your money back. And why not have more campgrounds in your network of cheaper RV living?
The price for this membership is inexpensive, but because of the high cost of KOA campgrounds in general, even the discount doesn’t typically make it worth it for us to choose a KOA. However, if you DO stay at a KOA, you might as well have the rewards program. We’ve saved more than we spent on the membership.
Is it on our list of top-to-buy memberships? No. But we wouldn’t say don’t buy it either. See if it makes sense for you.
No doubt, someone’s going to lose their mind that we said this wasn’t worth it – but as full-timers who work full time, it’s just not practical for us to use this membership unless we’re needing just a single overnight stay, which is VERY rare.
We tend to travel on the weekends and then stay put for a full week. We also need steady electricity (for our internet and computers), and messing with a generator during the work week is stressful for us.
We had Harvest Hosts for over a year but only used it once. That said, we know plenty of people who love this network. If you’re just looking for great escapes on the weekends or don’t need reliable internet – this would definitely be a great membership!
This membership is amazing…but it just doesn’t fit for what we need as full-time RV’ers. Weekend trips, totally. But if you’re looking for cheap RV living while working full time, this might not do it for you.
If you plan to stay in one place for months or a year at a time, memberships might not be worth it for you. But for the rest of us, memberships can save you lots of money when living and traveling in an RV full time. Hopefully our assessment above was helpful for you as you make a decision about what memberships are worth it for you.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to buy all the memberships at once – hold off until you need each membership, then jump on board. That’s what we wished we would’ve done.
Lastly, we’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t mention how we bring all our memberships together – RV Life Trip Wizard. With RV Trip Wizard, we can book our trip while prioritizing and filtering by just campgrounds that are in our networks (and have a certain price and rating, if we want). Before RV Life Trip Wizard, we would have 6 browser tabs open trying to cross-reference Google Maps and each of our networks maps. It was an absolute nightmare.
Once we found RV Life Trip Wizard, we cut our trip planning time in half and eliminated our frustration. It’s a dream.
If you don’t already have RV Life Trip Wizard – go grab it. It’s the easiest money you’ll ever spend, especially if you’re a full-timer. Use code “BETHANDCOURT” (from a web browser) for 20% off your first year.