Trip planning, whether for a weekend excursion or a long vacation is a lot of fun but it can be a challenging even with the tools we have available today. Which route to take, where to stay, and what activities to enjoy are all part of the planning. Understanding what a trip is going to cost can be a bit more difficult. Let’s start by giving a general overview of the software.
Calculating the costs of a planned trip is really just the old act of budgeting. It is not fun or exciting for most of us, but is necessary when we are making decisions about a much anticipated trip. The easiest way to estimate what future trips are going to cost is to look back and see what past trips have cost. Collecting that data in a single place has always been difficult, but now we have a tool to aid us.
The RV Trip Tracker allows us to gather the individual costs of a trip and keep them in a single place. Then we can summarize all this data and understand what our trips cost us both over a period of time and over a distance. We can then bring this knowledge forward and use it to get an estimate of what future trips are going to cost.
If we know our trips h
ave typically cost us $32.00 per day, then a 14 day trip is going to cost $448.00. If we are spending $1.25 per kilometer, a 865 kilometer trip will cost $1,081.25. So a 14 day trip of 865 kilometers will cost about $1,529.25.
With the RV Trip Tracker you can catalogue all the vehicles you use. If you have a motorhome with a towed, both can be recorded and have expen
ses recorded for them. If you travel with a truck and trailer, enter just the truck, or enter both if you wish. You can keep track of maintenance expenses as well as trip costs.
Then set up your trip. One of the handy features of the RV Trip Tracker is you can set up trips ahead of time so that trip expenses incurred before the beginning of the trip, like groceries, can be recorded and included in the trip.
When you start, your trip enter your beginning mileage then at the end of each day enter your ending mileage. The app will carry forward your mileage to start each day. During your trip record your expenses as you incur them. Fuel, campsites, and groceries are among the items you can keep track of.
During the trip the app will give you a running total of mileage and basic expenses. And at the end of the trip you can get a summary of the trip or you can export the entire trip so you can load it into spreadsheets or another database for your own special analysis.
Then on your next trip, once you have decided where you are going to go and how long you will be away, you can easily estimate what the trip is going to cost.
