RV Travel VS Hotel Vacation – Budget Comparison

When we bought our RV, I knew we were immediately committing to a LOT of travel over the next few years. After all, an RV is a BIG expense and we wanted to use it! I thought a lot about how we could quantify our RV trips to make sure we were ‘getting our money’s worth’ out of our RV purchase.

Four years later, we sold our first RV and upgraded from a 24 foot travel trailer to a 30 foot toy hauler. We know we love RV life and plan to continue traveling this way for years (although hopefully with a few international trips mixed in too). So now that we have final counts for how many nights we camped in Lil Bex and how much we paid for campgrounds over 4 years, we can actually do the math.

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RV Cost – What Does it Cost to Own an RV?

It’s not a trade secret that RVs are not good investments. They depreciate more than automobiles and can be hard to sell. (Ask us how we know!) And because we knew we wouldn’t sell our RV for anywhere near what we paid for it, we were determined to use it well.

We sold our RV for $15,000 less than what we bought for it. And for the purposes of this thought exercise, we’re going to round that number up to $20k to account for some of the upgrades and maintenance costs of owning the RV. RV storage cost should also be factored into the total of RV ownership. Since we have always parked our RV on our property between trips, we have not had to pay any RV storage cost.

Camping Cost – More Than Campground Fees

So if it cost us $20,000 to own Lil Bex, how much did we spend on camping itself? Let’s look at our nightly cost of owning the camper and then our average campground cost.

Over the four years we owned Lil Bex, we camped for a total of 349 days. (Yes, that is nearly 25%.) That gives us a RV cost of $57 per night of use.

Now before you are too amazed at how affordably we vacationed, we have to add in the cost of campgrounds. We stay at a lot of state parks and boondock when we can, so our average campground cost is lower than you’d pay at a KOA or RV resort. (RV camping is basically glamping but we do not pick bougie campgrounds.)

Our average campground cost over the past four years is $25, so our combined RV and campground cost is $82 a day.

On one hand, I’m thrilled to hear that we only spent $82 per day camping in our RV. On the other hand, when you multiple that by the 100-ish days of RVing we do each year, that’s a lot of money! But before we freak out too much about this number, we need to do a little bit more math.

Estimating Trip Costs for 2024

Let’s zoom into 2024 specifically. In 2024, we spent 114 nights camping over 3 different trips. We spent a month in Florida in the winter, including 2 weeks in the Keys. In the spring, we saw the total solar eclipse in Indiana, visited friends in New Mexico and Utah, and toured Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce Canyon National Parks. Then in the fall, we spent a few weeks in New York at Niagara Falls, Watkins Glen, and Letchworth State Parks, stopping at the two National Parks in West Virginia and Ohio on the way.

What would these trips look like if we didn’t have an RV? If we didn’t work remotely and homeschool and had to spend vacation time on these trips? How much would this cross country travel with kids cost if we stayed in hotels?

After we do this math, you’ll see where RV life really shines.

Comparing an RV trip of several thousand miles and 4-6 weeks to a 1 week vacation flying across the country is a little tricky, but here’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to assume that our fuel costs for the truck and our flights for 4 people plus rental car would cancel each other out. We’re also not going to count food costs, because this can vary wildly and it’s difficult to calculate fairly. So this comes down to purely a lodging comparison.

Here’s how I priced out comparable trips in moderately nice lodgings. 7 days in the Florida Keys would cost $1,940. 4 days at the Grand Canyon would be $1,000. Hotels near Zion and Bryce Canyon for 9 days would total $2,978. And 8 days near the 3 New York state parks we visited would be $2,256.

So assuming you could swing the vacation days to fly to all four of these locations in a single year, you’d spend $8,174 on lodging for 28 days, for an average lodging cost of $292 per day. Our RV cost and campground cost for 2024 was $9,481, but we enjoyed these beautiful places for 114 days.

Now obviously 114 days of RV life is not the same as 114 days of vacation. But we would have spent roughly the same amount of money traveling to the same 4 main destinations with 28 days of hotel-style travel as we spent in 114 days of RV travel with kids. That’s fantastic!

It’s the Journey Not the Destination

A popular phrase in RV life is ‘It’s all about the journey, not the destination.’ And we’ve definitely found that to be true. There’s so much fun and so many amazing experiences to be found along the way to the main destination you originally had in mind. And when you RV, you have the opportunity to add those to your trip itinerary. For example, our visit to the Florida Keys also included 2 weeks in other parts of Florida. Our trip to the Grand Canyon also included stops at Petrified Forest National Park, a friend’s house in New Mexico for several days, and a campground in the path of the 2024 total solar eclipse. And we actually visited Zion and Bryce as part of the same trip. Combining all 3 of those parks would have been challenging to do as a regular vacation, because in our example above we allocated a total of 13 days between those two trips and there’s nearly 6 hours of drive time between those 3 parks (not counting travel to and from the airports). When you RV, you get to visit more places.

Not to mention, RV life is how to travel with kids with less stress. (We talk about this in our RV travel story.)You’re bringing their beds, their toys, and their favorite snacks along without having to unpack and repack them over and over throughout your trip. Traveling with kids might not be easy, but RVing definitely makes it a lot easier!

So… is owning an RV worth it? We’d say yes. To sum up, we love RV life because it opens the door to more destinations and more time out in nature than we would be able to afford (or have vacation time for) if we stayed in hotels. We’ve prioritized travel heavily at this stage of our lives, and RV life has allowed us to maximize our experiences.