This weekend, my wife and I are attending the 2022 D23 Expo in Anaheim, California — representing Laughing Place, the Disney fan site we write for. Seeing as we live in Springfield, Missouri (which is very much not near California), we’d likely fly to the event if we were normal people. Alas, we are not actually normal nor are we sane. Plus, with us recently adding a pet to our family and still feeling uncomfortable with leaving her alone, we decided to road trip to the Golden State. Now, as we’re preparing to head home and looking at where to book our stop(s), I’ve just discovered that the Wyndham app has a cool tool that’s making the process much easier.
On the way out here, we decided to stay at a couple of La Quinta locations since I’ve often heard that the brand is pet friendly. As you may or may not know, La Quinta is owned by Wyndham — with several other roadside staples such as Super 8, Days Inn, Ramada, and many more also under the Wyndham umbrella. So, it does make sense that the company would lean into this by offering such a feature, yet I never knew it existed until this week.
When you open the Wyndham app, the road trip planner actually couldn’t be much easier to find. Right under the main Search option is the “Book a Road Trip” planner. Tapping that banner, you’ll be taken to the Plan a Road Trip interface, including a few options you can choose from. For one, you can tell the app whether you already know what cities you plan on stopping in or you can have it recommend stop locations to you. That’s the one I opted for this time as I was debating a few different potential pit stops.
To customize your Recommended Stops, you can first enter your start and end points. Key to us, we were also able to toggle on the “Traveling with Pets” option. For those driving larger vehicles, there’s also a “Show Hotels with Truck Parking” feature. After entering my selections, I tapped “Add Overnight Stops, ” at which point I was asked to set the approximate hours (or distance) I wanted to drive each day. Based on my responses, it recommended a stop in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
With that, selecting “Search” let me choose the dates of each stay and view available options. Plus, since Springfield is home and we don’t need to book a hotel there, I was able to go into my itinerary and note as much. From there, it was just a matter and swiping through available properties, selecting room options, and finishing my booking. You can also see your overall itinerary, which would be even more useful if I was making more than one stop.
Apparently this Road Trip Planner launched in May 2022 — so, while I’m a little late to the game, I’m not that far behind. In any case, I’m glad to have discovered it now as it definitely helped fill in a few blanks I left for myself as I await my journey home. So, should you find yourself in a similar situation, I’d recommend giving the Wyndham app a look to see if this feature proved useful for you as well.