RV LIFE Pro is the latest refresh of three popular software tools for RVers that come together under one umbrella called RV LIFE Pro.
RVing is more popular than ever, and with that popularity comes an influx of new RVers that aren’t familiar with important basic skills such as finding campgrounds, planning an RV-safe route, and the detailed RV trip planning you should be doing before you hit the road in that brand new or rented RV.
We’ll explain the top 8 benefits of RV LIFE Pro.
What is RV LIFE Pro?
To understand the top 8 benefits, we need to know exactly what RV LIFE Pro is. RV LIFE Pro consists of three tools: RV LIFE Trip Wizard, the RV LIFE GPS & Campgrounds mobile app, and RV LIFE Maintenance.
RV LIFE Trip Wizard
RV LIFE Trip Wizard is a web-based RV trip planning tool that you can access with any popular web browser on your computer, laptop, or tablet. It is used to carefully plan your RV trip by allowing you to select and plan all campground stays, fuel stops, rest area visits, and any other route diversion you need to take into consideration when driving or towing an RV.
RV LIFE GPS & Campgrounds App
Also included in RV LIFE Pro is the RV LIFE GPS & Campgrounds app, a mobile navigation app designed to help you easily find and navigate to your destination with RV-safe directions.
Best of all, you can pull up those great tips you planned in RV LIFE Trip Wizard and navigate the entire journey on your mobile device without having to type in a single address.
RV LIFE Maintenance
Completing the hat trick for RV LIFE Pro is a browser-based RV maintenance tool called RV LIFE Maintenance. With RV LIFE Maintenance, you can enter and track all of the equipment for your RV and get email reminders when maintenance is due.
Top 8 Benefits of RV LIFE Pro
1. No more guesswork
Rookie RVers face a lot of unknowns when they first hit the road. Is that road safe? How long do I drive? Where do I find campgrounds?
RV LIFE Pro removes that guesswork by helping you plan every aspect of your exciting RV trip before you leave. Knowing exactly where you will drive, sleep, eat, fuel up, and take breaks before you get behind the wheel is invaluable.
2. No more typing
One of the biggest frustrations with entering locations on a phone for navigation is the typing. The more complex or uncommon the location is, the more Job-like your patience level needs to be.
The RV LIFE GPS & Campgrounds app reads your RV LIFE Trip Wizard trips from the cloud and automatically populates them into your phone. When you are ready to hit the road, just pull that trip up in the RV LIFE app and tap to your first destination and begin. No address typing, predictive text, or spell checker to steer you in the wrong direction.
3. No more map updates to worry about
If you have been a traditional user of RV GPS units, you know that keeping the maps updated was a critical yet often difficult task. Portable GPS devices could at least be moved to the computer where the battle could take place on even footing. For in-dash head units however, updating often involved SD cards, USB devices, cables, and extension cords.
The maps in RV LIFE Trip Wizard and RV LIFE Pro app are always current and never need updating, so you never have to worry about if you are working with an outdated map.
Note that the RV LIFE app does give you the option to download maps to your phone if you are concerned about entering an area with poor cell coverage. In those cases, those maps would need to be updated, however those updates are completely free and done on the phone, inside the RV LIFE app. No cables, adapters, or download files to worry about.
4. Everything is included
Traditional RV trip planning involved carrying a huge campground directory guide, a truckers atlas, and often an exit guide that showed which fuel stops and eateries were clustered around various exits along your route. Most RVers added a state or national park guide to that mix as well.
With RV LIFE Pro, all of the data those books and guides offered is already built in. During trip planning, you’ll find that RV LIFE Trip Wizard has the full offering of all campgrounds via its integration with CampgroundReviews.com. Additionally, fuel stops, rest areas, stores, restaurants and much more can all be added to your trip from inside RV LIFE Trip Wizard.
You can even vet that trip thoroughly using both street and satellite view to make sure your route and destination are to your liking. Concerned about steep inclines or grades? The elevation and gradient chart built into RV LIFE Trip Wizard shows you both elevation and grade along your route.
5. It’s for real RVers, by real RVers
RV LIFE Pro isn’t some venture capitalist’s dream of an app to just make money, or a big RV company’s inroad to sell more service or accessories. RV LIFE is a community of real RVers that bring you popular sites like iRV2, RV LIFE Campgrounds, Camper Report, Do It Yourself RV, and of course, the RV LIFE digital magazine. They also provide two dozen brand or platform specific forums to help RV enthusiasts with questions about their rig.
The RV LIFE GPS app was born from the desire of RV LIFE Trip Wizard users to take those great trip plans with them digitally, rather than just printing them out or dumping them to a spreadsheet. The fusion of those two products formed the beginnings of RV LIFE Pro.
The team at RV LIFE is constantly providing new, interesting, and cutting edge updates to the products based on feedback from RVers.
6. Great value
At the current introductory rate of $49 per year, RV LIFE Pro is a great value. I wouldn’t expect that price to last forever though. Even at double that price, you’d be looking at only $8 per month for the most complete RV trip planning suite available.
The inclusion of RV LIFE Maintenance makes it that much more affordable. To be fair, RV LIFE Maintenance still needs work as the onboarding process can be laborious for the non-technical. Expect it to get the same spit and polish that they have given to their other tools in the next year or two.
7. Best of both worlds
Whether you are a dyed in the wool app user, or prefer to use the big screen whenever possible, RV LIFE Pro has you covered. RV LIFE Trip Wizard is a browser-based program that runs on popular web browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Most users will want to do their heavy RV trip planning on a laptop or something with a larger screen. For you cat-like ninjas that can type out a novella on your iPhone at a rate that would make Evelyn Wood faint, you can plan those trips on your phone the same way.
Whichever side of the big screen versus little screen debate you fall on, you can still navigate that trip with the RV LIFE GPS app once you are ready to hit the road.
8. Nothing else is even close
No other RV trip planning and routing product out there comes close. Some are mobile-only apps, while others use automobile routing instead of RV routing. Some are limited to favored or branded campgrounds, rather than being fully inclusive of all campground locations and brand agnostic.
Nothing else out there is as complete and detailed, allowing you to plan intricate multi-week or multi-month trips, while at the same time giving you the flexibility to take a quick, ad-hoc trip to a local campsite over the weekend.
Conclusion
RV LIFE is a company to watch, and the RV industry has noticed. RV LIFE Pro shows their commitment to offering a high quality product to RVers and the RVing community in general. New and veteran RVers alike will benefit from RV LIFE Pro.
Learn more about RV LIFE Pro on RVLife.com.
A couple of suggestions. I am still having a difficult time planning out fuel stops. I also should be able to designate a home base. It’s currently treated as any other stop. Google maps allows me to click on my house from anywhere and I am headed back home. It did greatly help me plan a stop to break up my trip at a resort I didn’t know about.
Does the program redirect for traffic that I get with RV GPS?
I wish RV Life would interface for reserving a site.
I use RV Life and I really like its easy interface and RV safe routes. Good article.