This morning I woke up and looked out my window. Partly to see the sun, but also to remind me where I am, because it changes. At age 57 I stopped working, sold my house and all my stuff, bought a new fifth wheel, and moved 1,100 miles from the warmth of Southern California to the gloom of the Pacific Northwest. The reason is simple, and small, my new granddaughter!
After 14 months staying with the kids, watching the baby grow and helping my son with his fixer-upper home, my wife and I hit the road. Our first 6-month sojourn south started last November. We were not newbies to the RV life, we’d owned a Jayco hybrid camping trailer for 22 years and had camped in every state west of the Rockies, and several on the other side, even Canada. But those were 3-week trips, and living in an RV full-time comes with logistical challenges. None the least of which is a place to park every night.
I looked into several options including KOA, Harvest Host, Good Sam and Thousand Trails. There were varying prices, options, and features. Ultimately I chose two options, first was Harvest Host. This program offered thousands of short term 1-2 night stays at a variety of locations, both commercial and residential. They stay is supposed to be ‘free’ but campers are encouraged to make a purchase from the business or leave a tip or monetary gift to the host. I liked this program because many of the sites are very close to travel routes and make for nice stopovers when you’re making a long drive between destinations and just need a place for a night.
The other program I signed up for was the Camping Pass offered by Thousand Trails. This is a nationwide chain of RV ‘resorts’ which offer short and long term stays. They also have an ownership program, but which the company refuses to acknowledge is actually a time share. Remember the old saying about walking and talking like a duck then it must be a duck!
The TT Camping Pass offers 12 months of camping with no nightly fees for an annual fee of $725 per region. We purchased the Southwest Region which included California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. There are restrictions naturally, but it sounded great. The reality was far from the sales pitch! We’d stayed at a couple of TT parks in the past so we kind of knew what we were getting into but overall were very disappointed. Here are the reasons we canceled our membership.
- Stay Restrictions – You are limited to a 14 day stay which is reasonable. And if you stay 14 days then you can’t stay again at any ‘resort’ for another 14 days. I paid just $570 ($625.86 with tax) for 180 days of camping! Now I’m not so naive as to believe that we were really going to get that many days, but I figured we’d try it out and see what we could get.
- Reservations – Like any campground you need to make reservations far in advance. With a Camping Pass you are limited to 60-days out. If you want to reserve space farther ahead then you, of course, need to upgrade your membership to a higher level. The first, and only, time we used our Camping Pass we reserved a 14 day stay at their Thousand Trails ‘Palm Springs’ ‘resort.’ Which isn’t in Palm Springs, it’s actually in Desert Springs. It was the only property in our region that had any availability, for members.
- Non-Members Given Priority – As I said, only one property in our region had space available within our 60-day reservation window when I logged in. But when I opened a separate web browser and checked the TT web site without logging in I found lots of space available, at the full retail price of course, starting at around $90 per night.
- Lack of Properties – Another issues was that although the Southwest Region pass we bought encompassed 6 states though 2 of them, Utah and New Mexico, had no properties. Nevada and Colorado only had 1 each. And in Arizona all of the properties except 1 were in their ‘Encore’ program which weren’t available to us on the Camping Pass.
- They’re Just Parking Lots – One of the biggest issue with any RV ‘resort’ is that they tend to just be parking lots. The sites were extremely close together with no shade and no privacy. We had a ‘cabin’ next to us (their cabins are just single-wide mobile homes) and we had to keep buttoned up the whole time because the people next to us sat on their porch all day and night smoking.
- Maintenance is Lacking – As is the case with lots of RV parks, maintenance is lacking. Sites with no water or power, broken laundry machines, hand dryers out of order, broken windows, potholes, peeling paint, unkempt landscaping, and just a general lack of maintenance.
We kept our membership after that experience hoping to stay at their properties occasionally. I kept logging in but everything was booked out for members. I ended up calling TT and canceling my membership. They refused at first, saying that it was a 1-year membership and that I could choose not to renew when it ended. But I persisted, worried that they would automatically charge my card even though I did not put a card on file and did not authorize a renewal. Ultimately they relented and sent me a cancellation email, which I’m hanging on to just in case.
In the end for my 14 day stay the $625.86 I paid averaged out to $44.70 per night. This is far above the $3.47 per night it would have averaged out to had I been able to achieve the maximum 180 nights of camping but is still half the $90 retail rate.
KOA Rewards
To replace my Thousand Trails Camping Pass I’ve signed up with the KOA Rewards program. During our last 6-month snowbird migration we spent a total of 10 days at KOA properties. Generally we stay at state and national parks and forests but every couple of weeks we will pull into a KOA for a night because it is a convenient way to do laundry. I spent a total of $645 at KOA between November 2023 and April 2024 and the rewards program would have saved me 10%, plus given me rewards points for free camping. And the KOA’s tend to be better maintained than the average private RV resort.