I'm working on comparing the cost of traveling in Alaska in 2008 with a small rented motorhome vs. renting a car and staying in B&Bs/hotels. The only thing I'm really not sure of is the average cost of staying in campgrounds. Could anybody come up with a rough guestimate? We would probably be staying at some public ones and some private ones, and my initial thought was $40 a night but that might be too low.

This would be during the shoulder season, either last week of May/first week of June or last week of Aug/first week of Sept.

Thanks!

A couple of summers ago, I paid as little as $25/night and as much as $80 for private parks. If you can get by with no hookups, the state and national park campgrounds are great. If I remember correctly, they were both about $12/night and the national parks cut that in half for my "over 62" lifetime NP pass.

Is there a reason that you must stay at a campground? In Alaska, if you can get 10 feet off the driving surface and it isn't posted "No camping", you can camp there. Along the Parks highway from Anchorage toward Fairbanks there are numerous turnouts where you will see RV's and trucks pulled over with people sleeping in them. The cost is within my budget (free).

Thanks for the answers! I expect that we would stay at both private and public campgrounds, and probably a few nights on the side of the road. So I think I'll stick with my guestimate of $40 a night.

It is nice to find a good private RV park occasionally to do laundry and have a REAL shower.

We enjoyed our three-week RV adventure in Alaska and wouldn't do it any other way. No hassle trying to find lodgings, which can be few and far between. We also saved on food, not having to eat every meal out.

I like the idea of the freedom and flexibility of renting an RV, but DH is concerned it will cost a lot more - which is why I'm doing a cost analysis. If I can show that it's at least reasonably close in cost then he's more likely to go along with it.

Right now it looks like the price of gas is the big thing, cost-wise. Around $3.50 a gallon the costs come out to about the same with an RV vs. a car, and over $4.00 a gallon it's definitely cheaper to get a car. That depends on how many miles we are going to drive, of course, and I haven't really gotten that figure firmed up yet so I'm just using a wild-a$$ guess. And there's no way of predicting the price of gas a year in advance, but I'd be willing to be that it'll be more than $4.00 a gallon in Alaska.

Sometimes it's tough being an engineer, married to a chemist. We analyze everything. So any more ideas on why it's better to RV than get a car would be more than welcome! I might have to sell this idea on more than just costs.

You might find the price of gas to be very similar to the lower 48. It will probably be slightly cheaper in Anchorage. But the cost of food can be higher esp on things like milk. Even family restaurants weren't cheap. Two of the cold bagel in the morning b&bs we stayed at charged about $100 (one was cash only). Although we ate out some of the time the only meal I thought was great was pizza at the Moose's Tooth in Anchorage. I wasn't that excited about our meal at Ray's in Seward and probably enjoyed our fried halibut at the family place in Kenai (Ski-Mo's) more (maybe it was the peanut butter milkshakes). We did not see salmon on menus in mid-June and were told it was too early. We were able to cook our own however, a gift from a friendly fisherman. As someone already said, places in Alaska can be few and far between. On the average, you will probably eat far better from a well-stocked RV frig. I thought some of the bakeries, however, were terrific and it was fun to stop at farmers markets.

when we rented (from Great Alaskan in 2002), a state park pass was included. You might check with the rental companies to see if they include the pass.

We stayed 5 nights out of 10 in state park campgrounds. We only stayed one place (in Fairbanks) where we had a hookup.