Trip Planner

[DougE]

Saw the TV spot on taking grandma to all the national parks. Curious -
Is there a trip planner that will allow you to put in all the points of interest you want to visit that will then figure the best route and sequence to follow after you set the start and finish points?

[dedmiston]

I've been playing with RV Trip Wizard, but I sure don't love it.

[Bob806]

Well, Good Sam's old trip planner was the best I saw, and they scrapped it for some reason. The new one is hideous IMHO.

Google Maps isn't bad, but the time factor doesn't take into account pulling a trailer.

[paulj]

How do you define best route? Even with 2 points, the goal is not clear. Shortest distance, fastest time, best views, easiest for a mega-rv? With multiple points that could be traversed in any order the choices go up significantly. How about overlaps and cris-crossing? How about seasons? Northern parks might not be open in the winter, southwest might be too hot in the summer.

Mathematicians have what they call the Traveling Salesman problem. It's an abstraction of this issue - how to visiting multiple points with a minimal 'cost'.

Rather than trying to 'optimize' a national trip, consider focusing on different regions. Utah is practically a region on its own. Hawaii and Alaska each require special trips. You also leave the RV behind to visit Isle Royale. Oregon has only one, which can probably be combined with a northern California trip (or possibly Washingon, with 3). There's another cluster around Washington DC. Each has its own optimal season.

[DougE]

Interesting, but starts at $17/year. Could be worth it for some travelers.

[GizmosMom]

My MS S&T has an "optimize" feature for stops. So I just did a Google search for "trip planner with optimize stops" and found this:

OptimoRoute

Hope this helps you!

[DougE]

Yes, I know several trip planners that let you add in stops along the way to your destination, but you have to set the visit sequence yourself. What I am hoping for is a trip planner that will let you put in a start point, an end point and various points of interest you would like to visit along the way. I would like a program that picks the order in which those intermediate points would be visited.
(I"ve heard the delivery companies have this capability along with chosing a route that maximizes right hand turns to minimize traffic delays).

[GizmosMom]

I know that you can load destinations in Google Maps. You can arrange them in the correct order then load the route.

I still use my MS Streets and Trips 2011 version for most of my trip planning. That's how tech challenged I am!

[Matt_Colie]

Doug,

I used to do this with Street Atlas by loading all the waypoints in the address book and the including them as stops. This worked, but SA is gone and there is no way (that I have found) to do this with any of the on-line planners.

CoPilot might do it, by I still don't have enough experience with it to be sure.

Matt