At the moment we are staying in a campground not far from Los Angeles. We're here for a full three weeks. The last few nights I've gone to the campground pool to swim a few laps and hang out in the hot tub. Last weekend we participated in Halloween celebrations organized by the campground. Today the kids went to a candy bingo event in the family center.
Me enjoying a nice evening at the campgrund spa!
What do you think is a reasonable price for 21 nights with full hookups (water/electric/sewer) and access to planned (free) activities several times every week in a nice campground not far from a major city?
If I told you that we paid $553 - does that sound reasonable (that comes out to $26.33 per night)? I don't think that $26 per night sounds that expensive, and most campgrounds would charge more than that.
Now at that price per night, someone like us that spends over 300 nights per year in campgrounds would end up paying $8000 or so per year, and I can tell you that we don't have that much in our budget for camping. To be able to still stay in campgrounds but pay significantly less there is, in the US, no better way then getting a Thousand Trails membership.
The $553 that I said we paid is accurate but is not just the cost for 3 weeks - it is our yearly dues that gives us unlimited nights in the 91 Thousand Trails campgrounds that we have in our membership. That is right, we pay $553 per year and can theoretically (and practically) stay 365 days in (mostly) nice campgrounds. That comes out to just over $1.50 per night! Now that is hard to beat.
Now if you think this is too good to be true, you are right. In addition to the yearly dues, there is a quite significant up-front cost. You have to buy the membership. We decided to buy ours used to save money and settled for a used Thousand Trails Elite Connections membership that we paid $4200 for. That is a lot of money, but if we add to dues and look at how much we end up paying per night in this first year we land on about $24 per night (assuming we stay 200 nights in the system and divide both the initial investment of $4200 and the yearly dues of $553 into 200). Still cheaper than must campgrounds charge for the night. This is not taking into account that our membership has a resale value of around $3000, if I take that into account it would bring the per night cost down to under $9 for the first year. It also does not account for the fact that the biggest sum of money is a one time cost and dividing it over more than one year will reduce the per night cost much more ($13.26 per night over 2 years and $9.77 over 3 years counting 200 nights per year).
We looked at the cost of camping before we got on the road as full-time RVers. And it was obvious that even if we just do this for 1 year a Thousand Trails membership is worth it. If we do it for longer, which we plan to, it is impossible to beat. Most full-timers that we meet or that I read about online have a membership with Thousand Trails.
Now it is not perfect, some campgrounds are less nice and have more of a "trailer park" feeling with many permanent residents in trailers that have seen better days. And the campgrounds are concentrated on the coasts - east, west, and golf. So when traveling, or staying in other parts of the US there will be no Thousand Trails campgrounds available. But it is still well worth it for us. Most campgrounds are nice and we like to spend the winters in the warmer parts of the US, and there are plenty of campgrounds to choose from in those areas.
One of our favorite campgrounds: Peace River in Florida.
Getting this membership and staying as often as possible in included campgrounds is one of the main reasons that we can afford to travel full time. It enables us to live very inexpensively if we need to and also means that we don't have to work as much.