Is Thousand Trails Worth it? Our Comprehensive Review

After 6 years of life on the road, traveling as full-time RVers, we reviewed our biggest RV-related expenses, to see what this footloose and fancy-free lifestyle has really been costing us each year.

We start by answering one of our most often asked questions. Is our Thousand Trails membership worth it?

Since 2014, we have purchased two different types of Thousand Trails memberships, plus an ‘add-on’. Let’s go over those, their key benefits, and what they cost us.

Even before we started our full time RV life in mid 2014, we purchased an annual Zone Camping Pass with 2 ‘zones’ (there are 5 zones nationally) about two months before we hit the road. We wanted to start making our summer reservations 60 days in advance.

Annual Zone Camping Pass

Back in 2014, this cost us $545 (plus tax) and enabled us to stay up to 14 nights at a time at 37 campgrounds, across the two zones. We had the South West and North West Zone with 18 parks each, plus the South Lake Tahoe Encore property which was included as a bonus.

We then needed to stay ‘out of the system’ for 7 nights, before we could stay at another Thousand Trails campground. Our ‘7 days out’ of the Thousand Trails system at other RV parks, usually cost us around $200-$300 for the week, depending on where we stayed.

Sometimes we would stay at a Thousand Trails park for 4 nights, then move to another campground for 4 nights and so on, then finish up with 14 nights.

How we used our zone camping pass

You can stay up to 4 nights at a time and keep moving every 5th day indefinitely, for no nightly fee, with NO time out of the system. But we work while we travel, and this became VERY tiring. By September, we had learned of a membership upgrade that would allow us to slow our travel pace, stay longer, and save on those “weeks out”.

We really liked our Thousand Trails membership, how much it saved us, and the friends we made in the campgrounds (an unexpected bonus). Even though we’d only had our Zone Camping Pass for about 4 months, we had already gotten our money’s worth.

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