How to plan a national park vacation

Guided tours

One of the easiest ways to visit several national parks in one trip is to join a guided tour vacation. You’ll be with like-minded travelers, and avoid the extensive work that goes into creating a multistate itinerary.

AAA Member Choice Vacations® (MCV) offers more than 15 tours featuring U.S. national parks. Each vacation price includes premium accommodations, meals, local guides, experiences, and transportation between destinations. Plus, an experienced tour manager will travel with you to handle logistics.

Customized vacations

If group travel isn’t your thing, give your national parks bucket list to your AAA travel advisor. They’ll build a one-of-a-kind vacation that gives you freedom to explore independently.

AAA travel advisors regularly partner with Pleasant Holidays. Itineraries can include flights, accommodations, rental car, activities, and travel insurance. Pleasant Holidays recently expanded its portfolio of carefully chosen hotels to meet the increased interest in national parks.

Pleasant Holidays also offers immersive experiences within the parks—everything from awe-inspiring helicopter tours of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona to exhilarating airboat tours of Everglades National Park in Florida.

Cruises

Cruising is the best way to see certain national parks. That’s often the case in Alaska, which has 66,000 miles of coastline, the longest in the country. Cruising on a Holland America Line or Princess Cruises ship is an affordable way to visit the otherwise difficult-to-access regions of the state, which is home to 8 national parks.

In Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, a highlight of Inside Passage cruises, ships sail close to the towering blue ice of a tidewater glacier. Onboard the ship and during optional shore excursions such as sea kayaking, you’ll be wowed by spectacular fjords, mind-blowing glaciers, and abundant wildlife. Keep your eyes peeled for bears, moose, and maybe even whales. 

Your AAA travel advisor can help you narrow the options to select a weeklong cruise or build a truly epic adventure with a cruise tour, which combines a cruise with a land-based vacation. A cruise tour is the gold standard for experiencing Alaska’s spectacular sights because you get to explore both by sea and by land. On trains, luxury motorcoaches, and/or floatplanes, you’ll access pristine wilderness in the Alaskan interior.

AAA advisors often work with Holland America Line and Princess Cruises to craft Alaska cruise-tour vacations. Both have been sailing in Alaska for decades, more than 75 and 50 years, respectively. This gives them the expertise and connections to curate adventures, such as flightseeing tours, guided bear-watching, glacier walks, and train journeys that trace the storied paths of the Klondike gold rush. 

Do-it-yourself trips

Do you relish creating your own trip itineraries? The creative and tactical challenge of planning can be stimulating and fun. You can use online trip-planning tools from AAA, as well as save money with exclusive AAA member benefits and discounts.

One of the best places to begin crafting your vacation is with your accommodations, because those tend to go quickest. In fact, the most-desired lodgings in or near national parks are sometimes fully booked as early as 9 months in advance for peak summer travel. 

AAA offers hotel and vacation rental (private home) options across the country, bookable online. Learn which towns travelers typically stay in while visiting a national park. For instance, if you want to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you could base yourself in Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, or Bryson City, North Carolina. Then plug in your preferred travel dates to compare lodging options. From there, build out your itinerary with flights, a rental car, and pre-booked activities.

Pro tips:

• Check for parks that require timed reservations for popular attractions. Some national parks instituted these systems recently to manage crowds.
• If you’re 62 or older, consider the Senior Pass ($20 annual, $80 lifetime). This gives you unlimited access to all national parks, a great reason to plan multiple vacations.