How to Plan a Road Trip With Friends (Without Fighting in the Car)

Road trips are the trip type people plan least and complain about most. The route feels self-explanatory — you drive from here to there, how hard can it be — right up until you're four hours from the next town at 9pm, nobody booked anything, and the person who's driven all day is being asked to do another two hours.

The scenery takes care of itself. The logistics don't, and they're what determines whether the trip is fun.

Plan by nights, not by miles

The useful unit on a road trip is where you're sleeping. Lay the trip out night by night, hang each day's stops off the night that follows, and two things immediately become obvious: the day you've accidentally given yourself seven hours of driving, and the night you haven't booked anything for.

Distance is a bad planning unit because it hides time. A 200-mile day on a coastal road with photo stops is longer than a 400-mile day on a motorway. Look at hours behind the wheel and cap it — four to five hours a day is the line where a drive stops being enjoyable.

Settle the driving rotation and the money rules on day one

These are the two things that cause actual arguments, and both are trivially solved in advance. Who drives which leg, whether the non-drivers pay more of the fuel, and what happens when someone doesn't want to drive at all. Agree it before you leave and it never comes up again.

• A named driver for each leg, decided before the trip
• A fuel kitty everyone pays into, rather than whoever's at the pump
• One person on navigation each day, so the driver isn't doing both
• A rule for the long leg — split it, or pay the person who takes it in snacks

Everyone in the car needs the plan, not just the driver

A road trip plan that lives on the driver's phone is useless, because the driver is the one person who can't look at it. Whoever's navigating needs the next stop, tonight's address and the check-in time without waking anyone up or asking three times.

bothways keeps the night-by-night plan in one shared place everyone in the car can open — and because it installs as an app with offline support, it still works on the long stretches where there's no signal, which is exactly when you need the cabin address.

Book the constrained nights first

Most road trips have one or two nights with very limited accommodation — a national park gateway, a small coastal town, the stop everyone else also needs. Book those first and build the rest of the route around them, rather than booking in order and discovering the important night is full.

Keep a shared list for the car stuff

The cooler, the cables, the aux adapter, the jump leads, the first-aid kit. Nobody's personal packing list covers these, which is why groups reliably arrive with four phone chargers and no way to play music. Claim the shared gear once, in one place.

Plan by nights, cap the driving hours, agree the money and the rotation before you set off, and put the whole thing somewhere everyone can read it. The road trip part is the easy bit.