marc2912
RVF Supporter
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2021
- Messages
- 264
- Location
- New York
- RV Year
- 2015
- RV Make
- Newmar
- RV Model
- Dutch Star 4312
- RV Length
- 43'
- Chassis
- Freightliner
- Engine
- Cummins 450HP
- TOW/TOAD
- 2022 Jeep Unlimited Sport S w/ Air Force One and Blue Ox
So where to start. After doing a decent amount of research into GPS and RV safe route creation in general I decided to give RV Life a go. They're decently price (which makes sense since they run on your hardware) and had decent reviews. They boast their directory of campground etc but what I really cared about is making sure I was on roads that could handle legally my rig.
Now they have a web interface but a mobile app so I decided to download the iOS one and would use that primarily, especially since my RV has a double din display that works with apple car play. The first weirdness is you can't create a trip on the app, you need to use their trip planner, that means you need to switch over to your computer. Not a deal breaker in any ways but definitely a weird process and inconvenience. Anyways once you load that trip on your phone it's very unintuitive in spots (now I don't consider myself lacking in this area, my company does Strategy, UX, Design and development for web and mobile apps so I have some knowledge in standard UX). Now, I finally get past that and since the app supports car play i hook it up and boom we're good to go.
We start driving and ... boom... the app crashes... no more direction... I try to restart it.... doesn't load. I have to kill it on my phone while driving to then restart it and chose my route again. It loads (painfully slowly even though I downloaded all the maps needed to my device) and starts showing direction on screen again. Except this time the route isn't highlighted in blue.. or any color so I can see where I am but besides audio notification to turn I see nothing. This cycle of terribleness happened multiple times throughout the trip. Since this trip I've looked further into issues that others have had and it seems RV Life's recommendation is to not use the app because people don't really use it. If that's the case maybe they should stop maintaining it and focus in one place.
I wish this was where my story ends but it's not.
For this trip we were going to a campground in PA. It's a decent size one that's been around for ages. When planning my trip, since RV Life has a library of campgrounds I searched it by name and it popped right up. I used that for my endpoint. Sadly that day we got a late start, it's a new RV for us and I had to work that morning. We got off the highway at sunset and started the backroad trip to the campground as it was getting dark. Not the best. We finally get less than a 1/2 mile away and it tells me to take my last turn on what seems to be a smaller road. I follow, dumbly (something I won't do again) the RV safe direction it's giving me. The "road" turns to gravel very fast and is single lane narrow, as in my RV just fits and barely, I'm thinking it might still be it since a lot of campground are gravel roads and different entrance and exits. In hindsight I should have stopped. I come to the top of the road and am faced with a hairpin turn so tight a pickup would struggle to do it and yet here I am in a 43' RV. It's pitch black outside and there's no way for me to do anything at this point. To say it was a nightmare to get out of there is an understatement and a story by itself, I'm counting my lucky star we didn't have a toad setup yet. Regardless when we did get out, i turned to google for direction and it got me to the campground about a mile away.
So now upon my return I took the time to figure out what happened. The pin for the campground is clearly in the wrong place. I checked the campground address in 4 different places, google, apple, waze and mapquest, all had no issue locating it in the correct place. I wrote to the app support, their first question instead of looking at what I was pointing was to tell me to make sure I had the latest version of the app and was logged in to get the RV safe route. I wrote back this time with a screenshot of their map where I wrote on top and showed clearly how far off they were. In my email I explained the terrible and dangerous situation this had put me in. Customer service never apologized, never admitted their mistake, nothing, not a care in the world to what a paying customer had gone through or to the fact that their app had failed, miserably, at doing what they charge for. We went back and forth via email a few times with me clearly explaining my disappointment in them not taking responsibility or issuing an apology. In fact the rep's last email said:
"I cannot change what happened. I found the problem and am having the pin corrected."
No, you didn't find the problem, I had to draw it out for you to understand it and in fact 2 days after my initial email it seems it's still just going to eventually be corrected. I have now filed a chargeback through my bank.
So here I am, a true GPS on order, and having made the plan that at all times I'll have 2 different systems running in parallel since those aren't foolproof either. I learned a lot from this trip, RV Life isn't the only one to blame, I should have picked up on certain things before, it was my first real family trip in a new (to us) RV, it was nighttime (I've decided to try not to ever arrive somewhere unknown at night again).
I hope this might help others out there who rely on one system to get them somewhere, and if you're reading this and you don't have that issue, well I hope this gave you a chuckle of a noob doing things wrong.
Now they have a web interface but a mobile app so I decided to download the iOS one and would use that primarily, especially since my RV has a double din display that works with apple car play. The first weirdness is you can't create a trip on the app, you need to use their trip planner, that means you need to switch over to your computer. Not a deal breaker in any ways but definitely a weird process and inconvenience. Anyways once you load that trip on your phone it's very unintuitive in spots (now I don't consider myself lacking in this area, my company does Strategy, UX, Design and development for web and mobile apps so I have some knowledge in standard UX). Now, I finally get past that and since the app supports car play i hook it up and boom we're good to go.
We start driving and ... boom... the app crashes... no more direction... I try to restart it.... doesn't load. I have to kill it on my phone while driving to then restart it and chose my route again. It loads (painfully slowly even though I downloaded all the maps needed to my device) and starts showing direction on screen again. Except this time the route isn't highlighted in blue.. or any color so I can see where I am but besides audio notification to turn I see nothing. This cycle of terribleness happened multiple times throughout the trip. Since this trip I've looked further into issues that others have had and it seems RV Life's recommendation is to not use the app because people don't really use it. If that's the case maybe they should stop maintaining it and focus in one place.
I wish this was where my story ends but it's not.
For this trip we were going to a campground in PA. It's a decent size one that's been around for ages. When planning my trip, since RV Life has a library of campgrounds I searched it by name and it popped right up. I used that for my endpoint. Sadly that day we got a late start, it's a new RV for us and I had to work that morning. We got off the highway at sunset and started the backroad trip to the campground as it was getting dark. Not the best. We finally get less than a 1/2 mile away and it tells me to take my last turn on what seems to be a smaller road. I follow, dumbly (something I won't do again) the RV safe direction it's giving me. The "road" turns to gravel very fast and is single lane narrow, as in my RV just fits and barely, I'm thinking it might still be it since a lot of campground are gravel roads and different entrance and exits. In hindsight I should have stopped. I come to the top of the road and am faced with a hairpin turn so tight a pickup would struggle to do it and yet here I am in a 43' RV. It's pitch black outside and there's no way for me to do anything at this point. To say it was a nightmare to get out of there is an understatement and a story by itself, I'm counting my lucky star we didn't have a toad setup yet. Regardless when we did get out, i turned to google for direction and it got me to the campground about a mile away.
So now upon my return I took the time to figure out what happened. The pin for the campground is clearly in the wrong place. I checked the campground address in 4 different places, google, apple, waze and mapquest, all had no issue locating it in the correct place. I wrote to the app support, their first question instead of looking at what I was pointing was to tell me to make sure I had the latest version of the app and was logged in to get the RV safe route. I wrote back this time with a screenshot of their map where I wrote on top and showed clearly how far off they were. In my email I explained the terrible and dangerous situation this had put me in. Customer service never apologized, never admitted their mistake, nothing, not a care in the world to what a paying customer had gone through or to the fact that their app had failed, miserably, at doing what they charge for. We went back and forth via email a few times with me clearly explaining my disappointment in them not taking responsibility or issuing an apology. In fact the rep's last email said:
"I cannot change what happened. I found the problem and am having the pin corrected."
No, you didn't find the problem, I had to draw it out for you to understand it and in fact 2 days after my initial email it seems it's still just going to eventually be corrected. I have now filed a chargeback through my bank.
So here I am, a true GPS on order, and having made the plan that at all times I'll have 2 different systems running in parallel since those aren't foolproof either. I learned a lot from this trip, RV Life isn't the only one to blame, I should have picked up on certain things before, it was my first real family trip in a new (to us) RV, it was nighttime (I've decided to try not to ever arrive somewhere unknown at night again).
I hope this might help others out there who rely on one system to get them somewhere, and if you're reading this and you don't have that issue, well I hope this gave you a chuckle of a noob doing things wrong.
