Way back in March of 2018, I wrote a post explaining the various camping clubs and why we ultimately chose NOT to join Thousand Trails. Well, this time is different – and we’ve chosen TO join in 2021.
First, a quick recap of Thousand Trails and the other camping clubs. Good Sam and KOA are basically the same and most widely held. Get 10% off your stay at member campgrounds. No restrictions or limits (other than the place being a member). The breakeven number of nights in a year is about 20*. Passport America gives you 50% off at member campgrounds subject to the varying restrictions on stay length and time of year. This on pays for itself after about 2 nights. Thousand Trails, at the most basic level, lets you stay for free for about $650/year. So the breakeven is about 16 nights – comparable to Good Sam. But unlike Good Sam, where you’re still paying $36/night after the breakeven – with Thousand Trails you pay nothing** after the breakeven…meaning the savings accumulate very quickly.
*For illustrative purposes, I’m using $40/night as the average cost at a campground. It’s about what we’ve found an average place costs during non-peak times. It might be closer to $50/night in 2021, but you can absolutely stay for $30/night too.
**After 30 days, the basic Thousand Trails members must pay a $4/night “resort fee” to stay at campgrounds. That fee has been waived in 2021.
Back to Thousand Trails! They have a few levels of membership options – each more costly and beneficial than the last. For this post, we’ll be using the basic camping pass (the lowest level) and discussing why we chose it this time, why we didn’t last time, and how much we might save.
The basic promise of Thousand Trails is that you pay a big annual fee in exchange for free camping thereafter. The way they make money is by all of the restrictions they place, making it hard to use the pass, and folks not camping as much as they need to in order to break even.
Our basic pass gives us one “zone”, the southeast, for like $650. We also added the “Trails Collection” for $350. There was a modest promo code, so our final price was $889.11. To recoup that cost, at $40/night, we’d need to stay for a total of 22 nights.
BUT….
We’re “in season” in Florida. The average nightly rate right now is $60-90+ and weekly rates are $500-800+. The place we’re currently staying, a Thousand Trails member campground, is $525/week! We know, because we paid it!
So we’ll recoup our cost in about 10 days because of where and when we are!
A big reason we didn’t join Thousand Trails last time was that we learned of it too late in our trip. By that point, we were on the move and cared most about hitting our target cities and staying close by to explore them. Thousand Trails has tons of campgrounds, but they tend to be 30-50 miles outside of big cities (especially outside of Florida). That wasn’t good enough for us on that trip.
On this trip, we don’t necessarily care where we stay. We just want to be in warm Florida. So if one park is full, we just look for another one. We don’t care if we’re in Orlando, Tampa, or Ft Myers. We would have joined TT on our first big trip had we learned of it during our Florida portion…maybe.
A big benefit of Thousand Trails in 2021 is that TONS of folks aren’t traveling. So getting a campsite is very easy this year. In “normal” times, one of the benefits of the upgraded memberships was a longer booking window. So 60 or 120 days instead of just 30 days. That meant that upgraded members filled up campgrounds before basic folks like us could get a shot. This year, there’s so much availability that we haven’t had an issue yet.
To recap, because we’re “in-season” in Florida, Thousand Trails makes tons of sense and will easily save us a few thousand dollars.
RESTRICTIONS
I hinted at it, but Thousand Trails, like all timeshares, has tons of restrictions. For our pass the basic restrictions are:
- 30 day booking window
- 14 day maximum stay
- 7 days “out of network” after a stay over 4 nights
- *Possible nightly fees after 30 nights* – just not in 2021
So after a 2 week stay, we have to be “out” for 7 days. For us, that means paying ~$500/week somewhere. So we’ll pay ~$500 every 3 weeks – ~$700/month to camp, not including the cost of Thousand Trails, for being in Florida in peak season. That’s approaching, if not a bit cheaper, than the long-term annual site rental costs!
So we’ll be seeing quite a few new parks this year. Maybe visiting new places in Florida – like the dreaded East Coast! But we’ll see.
It’s nice to stay a bit longer at places. 2 weeks is an eternity. And camping for free makes picking the “right” campground a lot less stressful.
Hopefully this post explains why we chose to join Thousand Trails on this trip, why we didn’t on our last trip, and how our adventure will be quite a bit slower than in 2017-2018 when we moved every 4-7 days.
