Best Road Trip Organization Tips and Tools: How to Organize your Road Trip Plans 2024

Planning a road trip is exciting, but how do you keep it all together? These road trip organization tools will help.

Road trips have a lot of moving pieces—and I’m not just talking about your vehicle (ba dum bum).

When you’re planning a road trip adventure, you need to keep track of all those potential destinations, accommodations, places to eat, things to do, etc., etc.

Then when you’re on the trip, you need to easily access that information. These road trip organization tools will help.

Why Being Organized is Important

Organization saves time

If you know in advance what you’re going to do and where you’re going to go, you won’t be spending time during the trip figuring it out.

Plan out your stops, activities, and accommodations in advance and you reduce stress and uncertainty. Nobody likes stress and uncertainty.

That being said, don’t over plan. See Top Tips for more on why over planning is a road trip buzz-killer.

Being organized increases safety

Proper planning helps you stay safe on the road. Knowing your route, rest stops, and emergency contacts can help you avoid any unexpected incidents.

Nobody likes unexpected incidents.

(Unless they’re those awesome detours you learn about while talking to the locals. Now those are unexpected incidents we can all get behind.)

Organization keeps you on budget (ish)

Knowing what you can spend and what you plan to spend (not always the same) can help you avoid overspending.

The last thing you want to feel when you get home is regret that you’ve spent more than you should have.

Being organized allows you to have more fun!

Being organized means you’re not searching for those confirmation numbers or trying to find a last-minute hotel room. It means you’re not getting hangry because you’ve got no snacks.

It means you can focus on the journey and enjoy the sights and experiences along the way.

Being organized is especially important when you’re taking long road trips.

Fundamentals for Road Trip Organization

There are as many ways to plan a road trip as there are road trippers, but there are two fundamentals for successful road trip organization that apply to everyone.

1. Keep your information in as few places as possible.
I’ve learned this first-hand. As a travel writer, I accumulate a lot of information when I’m on the road.

It’s also vital that I’m where I’m supposed to be when I’m supposed to be there. To make that possible, I keep confirmations, itineraries, etc., in as few places as possible.

2. Always have printed back-ups
Have a printed copy of your itinerary, et al, in addition to your online system. Phones break, batteries die, cell service is not always reliable, and neither is internet. Go old school.

Now the question is: where do you keep all that information?

Want more road trip tips? Download Planning Your Perfect Road Trip, a Step-by-Step Guide to Hittin’ the Road

Image of Planning Your Perfect Road trip on an i-Pad with glasses, a pen, a notebook, a cup of coffee, and some pastries. The book has road trip organization tools and more.

Road Trip Organization Tips

Following are a few tools and suggestions for keeping it all together. This is by no means exhaustive; new tools are always popping up, and they appeal to different types of travelers.

For example, I’ve found Trello helpful for bookmarking and the ability to create lists, but others prefer to do all their travel planning in Pinterest.

A stretch of the National Road in Illinois
A stretch of the National Road in Illinois

I’m also a fan of Notion and becoming increasingly more so.

My best advice is that if a tool/site/app sounds like something you would feel comfortable using for your road trip organization, test it out.

This is meant as an introduction to these tools. Please visit the individual platforms to learn specific details for use.

Create a Master Travel Doc

Whether you use Microsoft OneNote, Google Docs, Apple Note, or something else, creating a Master Travel Doc will keep all your information in one place.

Most of them will allow you to save or export it as a PDF so you can print it.

Your Master Travel Doc is where you’ll keep everything: your itinerary, your packing lists, and information about attractions (including hours and admission, if applicable), accommodations, and restaurants.

You can also use our handy-dandy printable road trip planner, with 35+ worksheets, checklists, and itineraries, designed specifically for road trip organization, available for only $10.

Stay on schedule with Google Calendar

Before you go, add your entire itinerary to Google Calendar. You can share it with anyone on the trip, as well as people you want to keep informed.

It’s easy to set up notifications for each scheduled item on your phone, and if you include the location, you can quickly access directions.

Add your itinerary to Google Calendar

Create a board (or boards) in Pinterest

In addition to providing lots of destination inspiration, Pinterest can also help organize the places you add to your wish list.

Let’s say you’re visiting San Diego. You can create a board called San Diego, and then create sections within that board for restaurants, attractions, activities, things to do, etc.

Create a board (or boards) in Pinterest

Basically, Pinterest is a digital vision board that provides a collection of all your potential destinations and activities.

If you’re concerned about people peeping into your plans, you can make your boards private. Traveling with others? Turn it into a group board and invite them.

Organize your entire road trip with Trello

Trello is an easy‐to‐use website and app. At its most basic, like Pinterest, it’s a bulletin board. You create lists and then add cards to each list.

Where it’s different is the information you can include in each card, and the ease with which you can save information. This makes road trip organization a breeze.

Create a board for your trip and add lists like Accommodations or Restaurants. If there are multiple people on the trip, each person could have their own list.

Organize your entire road trip with Trello

To save these interests while you’re searching online, install the bookmarklet in your Chrome browser.

Then when you visit the website of a place you might want to include on your road trip, you click on the bookmarklet and add it to the appropriate list. It will create a new card.

The best thing about Trello is how easy it is to customize. For example, you can create boards for each trip.

For long trips, create a list for each state. Then add places that look interesting as individual cards. For shorter trips, create lists for general research, accommodations, dining, attractions, etc.

As your road trip plans are finalized, add dates and confirmation numbers.

Moving cards from one list to another is a simple drag and drop. You can also share your boards so that everyone going on the trip can see them and include their own interests.

Keep it all together with Notion

Notion is a note-taking and productivity application that is an organizer’s dream. Some of the things you can do in this tool, which is free, by the way, include making notes, creating spreadsheets, bookmarking webpages, and managing files. You can also create databases without even knowing what that means.

There are templates so you don’t have to start from scratch, including—gasp!—travel planners!

It’s seriously powerful.

Did I mention it’s free?

You can invite up to ten guests if you want to collaborate on your trip. File uploads are capped at 5mb, so it’s not a place to store a lot of screenshots or images. If you want more, you can pay to upgrade your account.

The capabilities of this tool are mind-blogging, so I recommend checking out their guides and tutorials to learn more.

Let TripIt organize your road trip

This cool website and app make it easy to keep track of your travel plans. Forward your email confirmations for your rental car and accommodations (and flights, if you’re flying before driving) and TripIt will automatically plug them into an itinerary.

You can also manually add any plans you have, whether they’re for restaurants, museums, or other attractions you want to see. You can keep it bare bones or make it completely detailed.

They’ve got an app so you can view and make changes to your itinerary on your mobile device, too.

Go analog

In addition to all these fancy‐schmancy tools, I always recommend old‐school backups. My mom calls this the belt-and-suspenders approach.

If your phone battery dies, or you’re out of cell range, or you drop your phone and the glass shatters, you’ll still have everything you need to enjoy your road trip.

Print out your itinerary and confirmation numbers and keep them in an accordion folder. You can also use the folder to store any brochures or flyers you pick up along the way.

Keep it analog with an accordion folder + a notebook

It’s a good idea to keep a journal as well, and you can record expenses, mileage, and other details.

If you start or end each day with a recap of your experiences, you’ll have a book filled with memories that will keep your trip going, even after you return home.

Vehicle Organization Tips

Now that you’ve got your next road trip planned, it’s time to organize your vehicle.

Car organization is a personal thing. For me, it’s a game of Tetris and I get a distinct feeling of glee when I’ve filled the trunk or the back of the SUV to capacity.

Other people would get hives looking at the way I stack things like they’re a bunch of building blocks.

I’m not going to give you a schematic or tell you the best way to arrange your stuff. I can, however, provide some general guidelines to help you cart all your things around in a logical way.

Store things you want to keep handy in your glove box, center console, and door pockets:

  • Small hand sanitizer
  • Baby wipes/wet wipes
  • Face masks
  • Paper maps
  • Itinerary with confirmation numbers
  • Sunscreen
  • Sunglasses
  • Insect Repellant

Put your small cooler behind the center console or the driver’s seat. This gives the passenger easy access.

Put it on the passenger seat if you’re traveling solo. Don’t put it on the floor – you don’t want to try bending over to get a cool drink while you’re driving.

If it’s hot out and you’re driving a sedan, keep your large cooler inside the vehicle (unless you have other passengers, of course). If not, you can keep it in the trunk or the back of the SUV because you won’t be accessing it often.

Trunk organizers are also helpful for keeping things in one place.

Keep a trash bin or a plastic bag within easy reach as well. Those plastic cereal containers work well for shorter trips. We’ve used pet food containers for longer journeys.

If you’re taking a long trip, have a separate overnight bag for toiletries, pajamas, and possibly, a change of clothes. That way you don’t have to dig through all your stuff when you stop for the night.

Know where your First Aid kit is located. Hopefully you won’t need it, but if you do, you want to put your hands on it quickly.

Keep like with like, e.g., store eating things, like dishes, utensils, seasonings, in the same container.

Pack snacks and store any non-perishable food items in a plastic bin so things like chips, bread, and bananas don’t get squished.

Basic Road Trip Packing List

These are a few things you don’t want to leave behind. For more, check out these road trip essentials.

  1. Emergency car kit
  2. Spare tire
  3. Roadside assistance information
  4. Refillable water bottles
  5. Reusable shopping bags
  6. Multitool or pocket knife
  7. First aid kit
  8. Flashlights
  9. Batteries
  10. Jumper cables
  11. Paper maps
  12. Gas can
  13. Driver’s License
  14. Medical insurance
  15. Itinerary & confirmation numbers
  16. Cash
  17. Pen and paper
  18. Hand sanitizer
  19. Ice packs
  20. Disinfecting wipes
  21. Baby wipes
  22. Prescription medication + refill​​​​​​.

Hopefully these road trip organization tools will keep you on track as you plan your adventures and while you’re on the road.

For more road trip advice:

Want more road trip tips? Download Planning Your Perfect Road Trip, a Step-by-Step Guide to Hittin’ the Road

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