A discount camping club can be an excellent way to reduce costs when you are ready to camp in your RV. Half-Price camping clubs should not be confused with membership parks. Membership parks generally require a significant up-front investment (sometimes in the thousands of dollars), annual maintenance fees, limited access to the park, and costs to stay at affiliated parks.
Your discount RV travel club will have a low annual cost, about $40-50 annually, and gives you access to campgrounds across the United States that allow you to camp at half of normal nightly rates. Although this is not cheap camping, you will be able to save a significant amount of money if you have even a few nights of discount camping.
On occasion, the parks that offer these discounts will be off the beaten path. So, if you are traveling cross country, it may not be worth the detour to find a park. We have had to make some interesting, twisting, turning, back country highway detours to find a listed park. After a couple of phone calls and several direction changes, we finally found the park. This is not always the case, but it will happen often enough to make the search “interesting”.
We have used discount travel club memberships and saved significant amounts of money. One question you will face is whether to have more than one half price camping club membership.
Sometimes there will be parks duplicated in the club’s membership list. You’ll have to investigate to decide whether there are enough differences to warrant the cost of two or more discount camping club memberships. Two of the leading discount camping clubs are Passport America and The Happy Camper Club.