Caravan route planner for Europe

It is the thing every route planner gets wrong, and it is not subtle. A family hatchback is 4.5 m long and 1.8 tonnes. Hitch a 6 m tourer to it and you are 11 m long and heading for 3 tonnes; a twin-axle takes you past 12 m and over 4. Length and weight add up. Height and width become the caravan's, because the caravan is taller and wider than the car pulling it.

Plan with the car's numbers and every check you run is about a vehicle that is not on the road. A 3.5-tonne bridge reads as clear. An 8 m length limit reads as clear. The village with the width restriction reads as clear. You find out otherwise at the point where the road narrows and there is nowhere to turn around.

This planner works from the combination. Tell it what you drive and what you tow, and the route is audited against OpenStreetMap's own maxlength, maxweight, maxheight and maxwidth tags using the totals — so a limit that only the outfit breaches is a limit it reports.

Some restrictions have no number to come under. A road tagged as refusing trailers or caravans refuses a 2.5 m box trailer exactly as firmly as a 7.5 m twin-axle, and no amount of measuring gets you past it. Mountain passes do this, so do narrow historic centres and some coastal lanes.

That check needs nothing from you but the fact that something is hitched on. Tell the planner you are towing and it will flag those roads even if you have no idea what your caravan weighs — which is the normal state of affairs if you have borrowed it, hired it, or simply never weighed it.

Motorhome aires and German Stellplätze are the backbone of van travel in Europe and they are frequently no use to you at all. Many are motorhome-only in the small print. Most are laid out as marked bays for a self-contained vehicle that arrives, parks and leaves — which is an awkward shape to reverse a caravan into and a worse one to get back out of on a full August evening.

So overnight stops for a towed outfit are ranked differently here. A proper campsite comes first; an aire only counts as purpose-built when it says caravans in as many words. A site that welcomes motorhomes but says no to touring caravans is not offered to you, even though it would be the right answer for the same person in a van.

The planner also knows an outfit cannot reverse out of trouble, so it favours drive-through pitches, one-way site entrances and stops that do not need a three-point turn to leave.

Combined weight is what toll and vignette systems classify you by, and a car-and-caravan outfit crosses 3.5 tonnes without either half doing so alone. That moves you into a different band in several countries, and in most of Europe it also takes you beyond the scope of a category B licence issued after 1997 — you need B+E.

Where the outfit's total weight crosses that line, the trip says so once, in the trip note. It flags it; it does not pretend to tell you which licence you personally hold or what your specific toll will be. Speed limits are lower for a towing outfit almost everywhere too, commonly 80–90 km/h where a solo car may do 130, which is why a towed itinerary is planned with shorter driving days than the same distance would suggest in a van.

It audits the route; it does not reroute around a problem. A warning that names the road and the limit is something you can act on — a silently different line on a map is not, and no routing engine has a caravan profile to switch to anyway. Heavy-goods profiles apply lorry bans a 3.5-tonne outfit is exempt from; car profiles miss the bridges entirely.

It reports what OpenStreetMap knows, and OSM's restriction coverage is good but not complete. A day that comes back with nothing found is reported as checked-and-nothing-found, never as guaranteed clear, and days it could not check say so. The plate on your car and the plate on your caravan remain the authority on what you are actually allowed to tow.