How to pick a travel trailer
- Outdoors Made Simple
- Dec 6, 2021
- 8 min read
Updated: Dec 14, 2021
I am helping my friend Michelle find a travel trailer for herself and her 2 boys. In this post, we will outline the strategy we've used to identify her key features and to make a list of the trailers she might want to consider. We also used this strategy to pick our Alto trailer.
You can watch a video of our process as well here:
Table of Contents
Step 1: Identify your key features
You can use our free camper feature checklist to help with this step. There are a couple of key things to consider here.
Tow Vehicle and Tow Capacity
The key part of starting your search is to make sure you have a clear understanding of your tow vehicle limits before you fall in love with a trailer! If you already have a tow vehicle make sure you know what it can tow and what you are comfortable with. Once you are on an RV lot it can be easy to creep up in size and weight as you see the added features you get as a trailer gets larger.
Before you go, decide if you will be keeping your current car or if you will be buying something to fit the trailer you choose. If you want to buy something, make sure you have an upper limit for the type of vehicle you are willing to buy. For example, if you can't envision driving a large truck then make sure you keep your weight within a range that a smaller vehicle can tow.
Michelle is committed to buying a new vehicle after she identifies the right trailer because her current vehicle can only tow 1500 lbs. However, this vehicle will be her only vehicle so she doesn't want to have something too large that she isn't comfortable driving every day. That makes her limit her search to trailers that are 3500 lbs fully loaded (GVWR) so that she can buy something that can tow up to 5000 lbs and have plenty of headroom.
We know this is probably the most overwhelming part of the travel trailer search. We have a post on tow capacity that might help some with understanding tow vehicles and tow capacity.
Pick a Few Key Features
Next, make sure you know what features you absolutely must have. Some features will significantly limit your search, we've tried to indicate that in our feature checklist. If you end up with a long list of required features that are relatively rare, you will have a very short list of trailers that might work for you. More commonly, people will have something easier, like must have a bathroom with a separate shower and toilet or must have bunk beds. Bunk beds was the must have feature that drove Michelle's trailer search.
One caveat on this approach. Some brands allow a lot of customization so just because it is not obvious that a feature is available if something has a lot of what you want, it is worth it to ask.
For example, our Alto has a sneaky bunk bed that pulls out from the wall. It was kind of hard to find this information on the vendor website so we asked our sales rep about this. So glad we did because it is working really well and lets us keep our dining table set up all the time! Plus, we plan on eventually moving our son and his friends to a tent so when he is older, we won't have to travel with this bed at all.
Decide on your budget and financing
Here is another area where you can easily go beyond your original intentions. It is easy to add features and quickly increase your costs! We recommend you consider your budget and how you will finance the trailer ahead of time. Decide on how much you want to spend and what wiggle room you have if you find something that is beyond what you hoped to spend.
We recently got a tip on financing trailers, if you are going to buy a tow vehicle as well, and you plan to finance both, if you can buy the trailer first. That sequence can be better because RV loans are harder to get and having an expensive vehicle loan already will make it even harder.
One benefit of the long wait time for our travel trailer was that we had an extra year to save before we had to pay for the camper. That allowed us to have a good sense of what we could afford by the time we had to make our final choices for features (6 months before delivery) and we could add or eliminate features according to our budget.
New or used? And timing
Are you open to a used RV or are you only looking for a new one? There are pros and cons to both. Nested in this decision is also when you want to have your trailer. Buying either new or used could take some time and depending on how narrow your criteria are, it could take a long time for your perfect camper to make it to you.
New means you may have more control over some of the features and generally there is a warranty for at least the first year which will cover issues. You may also have more control of your timeline if you buy a new RV because you will either be able to buy one directly or order one and know generally when it should arrive. However, in the current RV world, and depending on what you want, you may have to wait a long time for a new one. We waited 14 months for our Alto. That was at least 2-4 months because of delays due to the COVID pandemic but even pre-pandemic, the wait was at least 9 months. For us it was worth it because we plan to have this camper for a long time.
On the other hand, like cars, most RV's don't hold their value once driven off the lot so you can save a lot of money if you look for a used one. In addition, and especially if you are buying one of the large, mass produced brands, many things that are going to go wrong initially will have already gone wrong so you skip the break in period. You do have to be willing to look around a lot and, again depending on your feature list, it could take awhile to find the right trailer. Some of them go fast so you have to be ready to jump when you see the one and possibly drive a distance to get to it. RV trader is a good place to look for used trailers, along with Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. You can often also find specific facebook groups dedicated to specific trailer sales, there is one for the Alto as well as many others.
Michelle wants an RV she can use for a trip we are planning to Utah next March so she doesn't want to wait that long! She decided to look for both new and used campers to find the one she wants.
Step 2: Do some preliminary research
We've tried to make this easy by consolidating all of our research into our membership section. At the time of this post, our guide includes over 90 trailer models and over 30 different brands. This guide is really targeted to people who want a small travel trailer that can be towed by a crossover, SUV or small truck. All the trailers in the guide are less than 5000 lbs GVWR and less than 23 feet long (many are much less than this). Almost all of them sleep 3 or more, with a couple of exceptions that were so cute I included them anyway. Most of them have bathrooms of some kind. If you are looking for a small travel trailer, this guide is for you. You can filter this by your prioritized features or brand and easily find the key information you need.
Of course, you don't need to use this guide and if you are looking for something bigger or smaller than we feature you'll have to do your own foot work. Here are the steps we took to start compiling the guide.
This is an obvious one! We were looking for small travel trailers so we tried that as a search and went from there to collect possibilities.
Youtube
We actually found youtube to be the best source of information because you can see the trailers and it really helps you visualize what might work for you. There are also a lot of the less commonly found RV brands covered on YouTube which really helped to broaden our list of possibilities (you can see more about the 7 trailers we considered here).
Here are some youtube channels we found helpful:
RV Blogger - They cover tons of different types of RV's and have some feature videos on small trailers.
Travels & Travails - Mostly cover fiberglass campers
Playing with Sticks - Very small trailers, mostly tear drops
Go camping!
We loved taking slow walks around the campground when we were looking to see if we could find anything we were interested in. Campers are friendly! If you see someone outside, odds are they are happy to talk about their camper. If you ever see us at a camp site I guarantee we will be happy to talk campers!
Make a list
Ok this might just be us but I'm a list maker and having a list of the campers and features for each one helped us keep track of what we had ruled in or out (of course that lead to the trailer guide we have on our site).
Step 3: Go visit
Once you have your list of possibilities it is time to go visit some campers. Even if you have a very long list, going to see a few can really help you get a better sense for what you do and don't like. While any RV lot will have some options, you may have to work harder to see the less common brands. Many of the smaller brands have an owner referral program where they will send you to someone who lives in your town and owns a specific model that you are interested in so you can see it. Unfortunately, many of these have been paused for safety reasons during COVID. It is still worth asking though, hopefully they will be able to start back up again in the near future. There are people who have purchased some of the harder to find trailers without ever having seen one and been happy with their choice. We found someone near us via the facebook community for Alto's (see next step) who was willing to let us come look at their trailer even during the pandemic. We are very grateful for those who are willing to share their time and energy in that way!
Step 4: Find a trailer brand community
The best thing we did while searching for our camper was to join the Facebook groups for the different models we were interested in. This allowed us to hear from owners about their experiences and ask questions about features etc. We've found all of them to be very positive and welcoming forums where people are passionate about their trailers. Once we had chosen our trailer, it was also very helpful to consult that community for input on features that have worked well, what people could do without and any changes they wish they had made.
Step 5: Have fun!
This is all about fun after all! Buying a travel trailer for the first time can feel overwhelming but if you take your time and follow these steps, you'll get there! If you have kids, don't forget to get them involved too. Ask them what they most want in a trailer and watch some of the youtube videos together.
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