Bringing RV Travel Scout To Life: An Epic Tale

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea

I’ve never loved any of the most popular tools available for finding and reviewing RV parks. RV Life’s Campground Reviews, Campendium, The Dyrt, AllStays—I’ve tried them all, and they all make me feel like I do when I pull into an RV park consisting of a barren gravel lot and sites spaced so tightly together that the RVs resemble rows of canned food on a supermarket shelf. Strictly speaking, they serve their purpose, but certain design characteristics, like seeing your neighbor’s stinky slinky routed next to your picnic table, make you feel vaguely yucky. Over the past five years, I’ve mostly resorted to Campground Reviews for RV park information, although I’ll occasionally take a gander at Campendium. On the whole, I think Campground Reviews provides the most relevant details and reviews for our mode of traveling: in an RV (not tent camping), usually in a park with full hookups (we rarely boondock).

I’ve often wondered why RV Life doesn’t put more effort into improving Campground Reviews. The value of their massive trove of reviews going back decades is diminished by a large number of features that are almost good—but not quite. Just as one example, while it’s great that they collect user reports of cellular signal strength at parks, it’s both mysterious and maddening that there is no way to search for parks based on that data. If strong cellular bandwidth is essential to your RV park selections, your only choice is to check each prospective park’s cellular reports one at a time. Campground Reviews has so many similar limitations that I wrote an entire blog post back in 2022 dedicated to enumerating all my grievances. A testament to Traveling WorkerBees’ scant influence over RV Life’s product direction, only one of my recommendations has seen the light of day. (And that, I can say with confidence, was nothing but a pleasant coincidence.)

I like to pick on Campground Reviews because they perpetually seem so close, yet so far from having a good system. But all the biggest players suffer from the same bucket of flaws: limited searching and filtering functionality, antiquated designs, and—most significantly—a narrow focus on RV parks to the exclusion of other essential aspects of RV travel. While a few have dump stations and/or rest stops, none let you review gas stations or RV repair shops, or offer a way to mark roads as safe or unsafe for towing. To this day, I don’t know how those of you with gas engines find fuel stations where you can confidently enter and exit without spiking your blood pressure. Since we tow our Airstream with a diesel truck, we’re able to use the same diesel fuel lanes that truckers do, and any place that can comfortably accommodate 70-foot-long, 13-foot-high tractor-trailers will have oodles of buffer for our comparatively diminutive rig. Having a diesel engine also means we can take advantage of the Open Roads fuel card, so we can pay at the pump and get discounts on fuel. (Consumer credit cards don’t typically work in the trucker fueling lanes.) If we had a gas truck, I guess we’d be using some combination of Gas Buddy and Google Street View to assess a station’s suitability.

The daydreams of building my own RV review platform started way back before we even owned our first RV. Those were Covid times, so we had to wait seven months for our Airstream Flying Cloud to be delivered. I spent a lot of that time poring through RV park reviews and marking all the places I wanted to go. I also took a lot of notes about all the things I didn’t like about the review sites I was using, and what I’d do differently if I built an app of my own.

There were (and still are) a million reasons why building something like this is a terrible idea. Although, as I write this, I can only think of four. Lol. But they’re BIG reasons, so I guess each one feels like roughly 250,000 mini reasons, each of which is trying desperately to talk some sense into me. Here they are, ranked according to my perception of the risk each presents.

1. Highly Competitive Market. Beyond the array of RV- and camping-specific review sites I mentioned earlier, I’d also be up against behemoths like Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor. Plus, sites like Campground Reviews have been around since the early 2000s. Even The Dyrt, probably the biggest new guy, has been around for nearly 15 years now.
2. The Cold Start Problem. Without listings and reviews, you have no users. Without users, you have no listings or reviews. I’ve done a lot of neat things over my career, but building a new online community from scratch isn’t one of them. While Jill and I would seed a lot of the initial data based on our own personal travels, the project would fail if it doesn’t attract a meaningful proportion of the RV community. Unlike Field of Dreams… well, you know.
3. The Long Time-To-Value Problem. I don’t know much about building online communities, but I know this: it’s both hard and slow. It would take years before I’d be able to gauge success versus failure.
4. Unclear Path to Monetization. While this would absolutely be a passion project, that’s not my only motivation. So how is it going to bring home the bacon? Ads? Subscription-based premium content? Email marketing? I’d have options, but all depend on one magic component that would have to come first: traffic. I’d need lots and lots of internet eyeballs, directing their ephemeral attention at my site.
   

Looking at that list, OF COURSE it’s a terrible idea! I should just focus on my day job—the one that already brings home the bacon—and enjoy the fact that I can do it remotely, thus allowing Jill and me to travel all over the country like a couple of free spirit hippies. That feels so sensible! (I like being sensible.)

But then I’d start planning our next RV trip. And I’d wish that it was easier to find RV parks that don’t consist of a barren gravel lot with sites packed in like sardines. I’d wonder why the only way to gauge whether Colorado Road 1A is safe for towing our Airstream is to google “Colorado road 1A rv towing” and pray for helpful forum results. (And just because RV Trip Wizard says it’s safe does not mean it’s safe. Ask me how I know.) And I’d still be mystified by how people with gas engines reliably find gas stations that are safe for ingress and egress! (Really! How?)

My brain would then blissfully disregard all one million reasons why building my own RV review platform was a bad idea, like a cat looking you dead in the eyes and nonchalantly whapping over your glass of water. So in June 2023 I whipped out my wallet, bought rvtravelscout.com, and got to work.

Timing is a funny thing

Nothing ever goes to plan. Doesn’t matter if you’re replacing your Airstream’s leaky kitchen faucet cartridge and accidentally break an O-ring (guilty!), or are building the preeminent RV review platform of the future. It’s also amazing how often circumstances that initially seem truly awful will later prove to be a blessing in disguise.

I knew going in that I wouldn’t build RV Travel Scout entirely from scratch. Especially as a solo developer, there was no sense in reinventing the wheel when I could buy some off-the-shelf software to kickstart my project. What I did not anticipate, however, was that the supposedly top-of-the-line software I bought to serve as my technical foundation would have more bugs than a porch light in July. For the first 18 months, my progress was constantly stymied by a platform that was difficult to use, poorly explained, and often unreliable. Time also evaporated as I agonized over what felt like millions upon millions of decisions, big and small, that would affect how Travel Scout looked, felt, and functioned. The color scheme. Email templates. Page layouts. Mobile device compatibility. The menu structure. Listing data. Data storage. It went on and on and on. And then, in January 2025, just as I started getting real traction, my day job was unexpectedly rejiggered.

Suffice it to say that the company I work for underwent a substantial reorganization and my responsibilities increased to a massive degree. It was an exciting period, but the demands of my new job sapped all my spare energy and time. I assumed things would calm down after a few months. They didn’t. When June rolled around—now two years since I bought the rvtravelscout.com domain—I hadn’t touched the project in six months. With no end to the corporate chaos in sight, I told Jill that I was going to pull the plug. I simply didn’t have the time and I was tired of paying annual renewals for software tooling and hosting costs that went unused month after month. I might as well have set the money on fire.

She convinced me to hang on just a little bit longer. The expenses weren’t huge, after all, and the highest-cost subscriptions didn’t renew until the end of the year. Why not at least wait until then?

Oh wise wife. I will be forever grateful for your encouragement.

As it turned out, not touching RV Travel Scout all throughout 2025 was the best thing that could have happened to me. Why? Because of two magnificent events that transpired at the tail end of last year. First, my job changed yet again. This time my duties were truncated rather than expanded and I suddenly had my cherished spare time back. Second, massively powerful AI services with unprecedented abilities to read, write, understand, and explain software code exploded onto the scene. At the dawn of 2026, I found myself blowing through RV Travel Scout work like thick tree branches fed into a wood chipper. Vvvvrrrrp!

It’s difficult to convey to laymen how monumentally powerful these tools have become for software development. Far from producing “AI slop”, I’d estimate that the work I completed between December 2025 and April 2026 would have required two to three years without AI. That includes features I previously wouldn’t have bothered attempting because of the time and complexity involved. But now, I can just point my AI tool at the codebase like an attack dog and tell it, “Sic ‘em!” By the time I opened RV Travel Scout to the public in April, it was a far more capable and polished offering than I had originally imagined.

What’s different about RV Travel Scout

Broadly speaking, there are three things I’ve always wanted in an RV review platform.

1. The ability to go beyond RV parks, because there’s more to RV travel than where you camp for the night.
2. The ability to “follow” fellow RV travelers whose reviews I enjoy reading, thus creating a “passive discovery network” of everything from wonderful RV repair shops to washboarded country roads.
3. The ability to do very granular searching and filtering, so I can hone in on exactly what I’m looking for.
   

RV Travel Scout delivers on all three of these goals, and will continuously expand on them over time. In addition to RV parks, it includes rest stops, fuel stations (gassers, rejoice!), dump stations, service centers, and roads. When you encounter a fellow travel scout with a history of writing reviews that strike a chord, you can follow them and get notified by email whenever they publish new reviews. And the next time you want to find RV parks that are rated highly for their scenic beauty or exclude those rated poorly for their sketchy neighborhood quality, you can take advantage of Travel Scout’s powerful search filters. The notion of road reviews is especially innovative. As far as I know, nothing else on the internet will let you drop a pin on a map and declare, “This road SUCKS for towing my RV!”

The first phase of Travel Scout’s development is now complete. The foundation has been laid. Its second phase will be focused on creating listings, gathering reviews, and continuously making it a little bit better today than it was yesterday. Unlike the days of yore when I was stuck using platforms that I had no ability to improve, now when I encounter some limitation or imperfection on RVTS, I can just fix it! This flexibility is a feature in its own right. RV Travel Scout is run by one dude: me. Aside from the RVTS Advisory Committee (aka “Jill”), there’s no one I answer to or negotiate with before rolling out changes and improvements. That gives me a refreshing amount of freedom to build RVTS the way I think it should work, without having to reconcile the competing priorities of product managers, designers, executives, marketers, engineers, and everyone else involved in traditional software development.

Sign up now!

Quentin Tarantino has commented that he still likes watching his own movies. When asked why, he said “I love them! I love my movies—I’m making them for me, but everybody else is invited.” When I first heard him say that, I laughed out loud. Yes! I thought. That’s exactly how I feel about RV Travel Scout. I really did build it with one solitary RV traveler in mind, based on my own perceptions of what’s missing from the current landscape of competing tools. While I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly welcome RVers everywhere to join in, it remains to be seen whether my vision will resonate with the community at large. Only time will tell.

If you’re interested in giving it a whirl, sign up here and let me know what you think! And while you’re there, consider creating a listing or writing a review for one of your favorite (or least favorite) places you’ve gone with your RV.

Or you can just tell me that it really was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea after all. 😬