RV trip planner for Europe

This is the single biggest adjustment, and it is better to make it now than at a rental counter. A mid-size American Class C runs 28–32 ft. The European equivalent — what rental fleets here call a coachbuilt or a semi-integrated — is 20–23 ft, and the most common vehicle on the road is a panel-van conversion at around 18 ft. Class A motorhomes barely exist outside a handful of specialist fleets, and towing a car behind one is close to unheard of.

That is not European fleets being stingy. It is what the roads allow. Village streets laid out before cars, mountain passes with unguarded hairpins, town centres with width restrictions, and campsite pitches sized for the vehicles above. A 30 ft rig is legal in most of Europe and genuinely miserable to drive through the places you came to see.

Whatever you end up in, tell the planner its height, length and weight and it audits the route against OpenStreetMap's own restriction data — the bridges, weight limits and width restrictions that a car-based route planner has no idea about.

Overnight rules are national, they differ sharply, and getting them wrong is a fine rather than a knock on the window. Free overnight parking is legal and well-provided in some countries and prohibited in others; what fills the gap is a network Americans arrive without knowing exists.

France has thousands of aires de service — municipal stopovers, often free or a few euros, water and waste on site, made specifically for motorhomes. Germany calls them Stellplätze and has just as many. Spain, Portugal and Italy all have their own versions under their own names. Alongside those sit conventional campsites, which are closer to a US private campground and are usually where you want to be for more than a night.

Wild camping — boondocking — is the part that catches people. Sweden and Norway allow it under a right of public access that genuinely has no American equivalent. France mostly does not, outside an aire. Portugal rewrote its rules in 2021 and a lot of the advice still online predates that. Every night in a generated trip is a real place with a real reason attached, not a pin dropped where the driving stopped.

Driving costs work differently and they are not optional. France, Italy, Spain and Portugal charge motorway tolls by vehicle class, and anything over 3 m tall or 3.5 tonnes usually lands in a more expensive band than the quoted car rate. Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic sell vignettes instead — a sticker or a digital registration you buy before you cross the border, not at a booth.

Then there are the low-emission zones. Most large European cities have one. France's Crit'Air requires a windscreen sticker ordered in advance; Germany's Umweltzone works the same way; Italy's ZTL zones are camera-enforced restricted areas in historic centres where a wrong turn produces a fine that reaches you months later, at home. Routes here avoid restricted centres rather than driving you into one.

Fuel is the other adjustment: expect roughly two to three times US prices, and most European motorhomes are diesel. Trip costs are estimated from your own consumption figure rather than a default, so the total reflects the vehicle you actually booked.

Europe rewards planning less ground than instinct suggests. Amsterdam to the Alps looks like nothing on a map next to a US road trip, and it is a real day's drive in a motorhome on roads with lower limits, more towns and no straight lines. The common first-trip mistake is a country a day.

Drive times here come from real routing rather than distance divided by an average, and a day that turns into a long transfer is flagged as one. If you would rather split it, the planner will — your day count is yours, and a long drive is a choice, not a defect.