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If you book an RV early and there are plenty of them available, the daily rental rate will be lower for you. A thing to note is that for certain rental applications like Bonnaroo or Burning Man, Cruise America may impose increased charges at their own discretion. In addition, they may require you to make a full prepayment in advance for rental events like auto race events, music festivals, or gatherings in remote areas.
Cruise America’s Top 20 Campgrounds of 2024
Two weeks before our trip, we called our rental location, The Truck Shop near O’Hare Airport, and asked if there was a good day to visit when it wouldn’t be too busy. When we arrived, there was only one Standard model on the lot, and it was waiting for repair parts. A traditional motorhome with the self-contained features you expect, units in the USA even include a power generator. This economical family unit is a traditional favorite for those who want the walk-through convenience of a motorhome. Cruise America handles parking and traffic violations in a similar manner to tolling.
Visit your Cruise America rental location and bring a tape measure
Cruise America requires you to make two kinds of deposits – a $300 reservation down payment and a refundable $500 security deposit. The joy of that adventure and the discoveries we made along the way brought travel back down to earth for us. A great place to start is with our post about 5 Things to Pack for your Cruise America Rental RV. Make a list in advance of everything you think you’ll need or want on your trip. Then go through that list and note the items you could live without. If you leave those extra items at home, you can save both weight and storage space.
Buy a Pre-Loved RV
The Vehicle Provisioning Kit includes kitchen-related items like bows, forks, knives, plates, and many other things. The Personal Kit includes items like bath & dish towels, pillows with pillowcases, etc. Upon the return of the vehicle, Cruise America accepts stored value/prepaid/gift cards. Aside from that, what we personally don’t like is that Cruise America has all the fee info scattered throughout their website instead of having it easily accessible in one place. Not only that, but we actually had to go to third-party websites to get some of the fee information.

RV Parks in San Francisco
As for the security deposit, it is used to cover any excess charges that occur during the trip. Upon return, extra charges are balanced against the security deposit. At rental return, you will be responsible for reporting and paying for any parking or traffic violations.
States for RV Campgrounds
And aside from some differences linked to the smaller size – like smaller water or fuel tank sizes – the Compact RV rental doesn’t differ from the previous two options. Cruise America also allows customers to attach a bike rack to the receiver hitch free of charge. The customer needs to again let the rental center know about the intention of mounting a bike rack so that the RV’s locking pin can be removed. Before moving on to overviewing the RV offers, we’d like to note that Cruise America provides quite a lot of information on their RVs. Compared to offers available on peer-to-peer rental websites, it may be much easier to make an informed decision with Cruise America. Luckily, we’d called ahead to reserve a spot, and explained it was our first-ever RV trip.
With peer-to-peer rental, not everyone is going to allow you to bring along pets. As a corporate rental company, Cruise America has its own RV fleet. On the other hand, Cruise has “more than 120 rental locations” in the United States and Canada, which is very little given that they are servicing almost the entire North America. So even though one-way rental has some nice benefits, you will be rather limited with drop-off locations. If you think about it, that’s about what you’d pay for most hotels/motels on a driving trip.
Nightly rates can vary during peak vacation months such as July and August. A testimony to this may be Cruise America’s frankly quite low BBB rating, which indicates how the company is expected to interact with customers. There have been so many complaints about Cruise America that BBB has even put alerts on the company profile page, indicating noticeable issues with customer service.
Have you also caught the RV bug and now wonder where to start? Join us (and our dog, Nola!) for motorhome and trailer reviews, camping tips, and money-saving how-tos that’ll inspire and motivate your adventures. We considered the 20-foot Compact model, but they appeared to cost the same or more than the Standard model.

With 6.5 foot/2 meter ceilings and walk through convenience even tall campers can enjoy the compact RV. With 6.5 foot/2 meter ceilings and walk through convenience even tall campers can enjoy the compact plus RV. Sometimes a one-way RV rental is good for more than a vacation – like when you’re planning to make a cross-country move. With RV rentals, one-way trips from your old home to your new home are relaxing and fun – not harried and stressful. Plus, you’ll save on hotels and other expenses during your trip.
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With one-way rental, you can pick up an RV at one Cruise America location and drop it off at another, without having to drive the RV back to the location where you took it from. Cruise America does not provide back-up cameras, but we didn’t find this to be much of an issue. You’re going to be backing up less than 1% of the time, and you will always have assistance from a family member or campground host. A tip I learned for staying centered in a lane is to keep scanning the side-view mirrors. Because of the height of the truck, your tendency will be to stay too far away from vehicles on the right side of your RV. You’ll learn to trust that you have more room than you think.
There are 126 Cruise America locations across the US and Canada. Because of that, we figured we’d be in good shape if we had trouble with our rig or needed to swap with another one while on the road.
Speaking of cash, the $500 security deposit needs to be paid with a credit card. If you are using any means other than a credit card, the security deposit charge will be $1,000. Keep this in mind in order to avoid quite expensive surprise costs.
In some cases, a process called reassignment is utilized by Cruise America. The company basically transfers your information to the relevant tolling authority. For repairs costing under $75, you may have repairs done, but you will need to keep the receipt with you for reimbursement. Rental centers will reimburse receipts under $75 without a service log.
And looking for the best RV rental service, you are likely wondering whether Cruise America is a good place to rent an RV from. If you’re thinking of a trip in a Cruise America rental RV, California stands out as a great place to rent one. The only concern is that there is just no way to cover the entire state in one trip! California is a very large state with an even larger number of things to do and see in your California rental RV. From the “City of Angels” to the Golden Gate Bridge, California offers up some of the richest exploration in the world.
Instead, you can book a one-way RV rental from any of our 132 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. If you’d like to see how Cruise America is rated against other RV rental companies you might want to check out our review of the best RV rental companies. For Early Birders, which we again mentioned earlier in the material, the return time is between 9 AM and 3 PM.
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