Reservations

Our experience has been you need to make a reservation near (within 25 miles) any popular Tourist destination. A few places we have been to seemed to be empty at 4 or 5pm. By 8pm, all spaces were full. Don't know if those folks had reservations or not.

Other than that, we have not had a problem.

You don't say when you are going. We find that during the school year,mid week is no problem at all. Start calling around about two hours from when you want to stop. Should be able to make Tx from Pa in a midweek trip.

We usually call ahead a few hours, but even then they are sometimes full, especially Passport America campgrounds. It's nice knowing your destination is confirmed.
JK

Resverations!
You have everything to gain and nothing to loss by making reservations in advance. Making reservations and does not LOCK you into a set schedule because you can always change or cancel a reservation. Always ask what the cancellation policy is. Call in advance to make sure the RV park is open. I never understood what the advantage is to wait until the day of your expected arrival and then run the risk of not finding a RV park site.

JKJavelin wrote:
We usually call ahead a few hours, but even then they are sometimes full, especially Passport America campgrounds. It's nice knowing your destination is confirmed.
JK

Totally agree! Why add additional stress to your life when it can be avoided.

I prefer to make reservations at least a day ahead of that travel day. At worse, I will call ahead early the morning of travel. The last thing I want after a long travel day is to find area parks full and then scramble to find a place to stay maybe a lot farther down the road than planned.

In all our years of travel, we very seldom made advance reservations and never had a problem finding a site for overnight. As already mentioned, if we were planning on staying overnight near a popular tourist destination, we would call ahead and see if a spot was available. Once in a while we would even reserve a spot - especially if we were planning on staying more than one night.

The reason for not making them was that we were never sure exactly where we would be wanting to stop. If we knew we wanted to stop at a particular campground then we would sometimes make a reservation.

Another reason is that most campgrounds want a credit card to reserve. We were not comfortable putting our number out there for a stranger unless it was the only way.

This was our preferred method of travel for over 40 years.
Barney

MarkTwain wrote:
Resverations!
You have everything to gain and nothing to loss by making reservations in advance. Making reservations and does not LOCK you into a set schedule because you can always change or cancel a reservation. Always ask what the cancellation policy is. Call in advance to make sure the RV park is open. I never understood what the advantage is to wait until the day of your expected arrival and then run the risk of not finding a RV park site.

Sure, you can always divert and lose your deposit...most places that take reservations want a non-refundable deposit. Some may let you change but frequently not...particularly govt parks where the rules are the rules.

Unless there is a holiday or a longer stay, we usually call the day before or even the morning of travel. Rare for it to be an issue.

Been my experience recently with all the new Covid campers that we need reservations. Better to have a reservation and not need it, than need one and not have it. And we have made lots of reservations and had to cancel with a minimum fee - if any - if outside of 24 hrs so it's not a huge deal. Things happen. But during the holidays with all these new campers, no way I would risk not having a reservation especially if I was pretty solid on my route and timing.

Reservations don't work very well for us because we typically don't know where we're going or when we'll be there. It depends on the season though. I wouldn't freewheel it during busy tourist seasons, but in the fall when most people are back to work & school it worked very well for us.

The night before a travel day, my wife and I would agree on a general compass point and vague destination. Then I would quietly research potential stops along that route. RV Trip Wizard has a feature that shows rings of distances, so I would look at stops around 300 miles away.

The next day on the road, I would prod my wife to start looking for places to stay. If she didn't have any thoughts, I'd suggest XYZ or ABC parks near some town. She'd either agree that they sounded good or pick someplace else, and then she'd call and book it when we were a couple hours away.

We only panicked one night when there was a midweek auto show in the small town in the Sierras where we were stopping. We still got a good spot in an offbeat park. That's the only time we've sweated getting a spot in our tens of thousands of miles of traveling.