AA Route Planner Review

The AA Route Planner we find is the best. It may have a touch too much advertising for our licking - but as its a free online service and not one you have to pay for and install then we feel feel this is a distraction worth accepting.

The AA Route Planner allows you to create route plans for England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Europe.

There are also added options of avoiding motorways and toll roads / congestion charging zones.

The results of a search are very good. They ask you to clarify the different locations.

The summary page is very good. From the one search you have a number of options such as viewing the directions, setting up SMS traffic Alerts, viewing a map of the route, getting a map of your start and end location and the ability to send the route to a friend.

The directions they give are very clear. They even highlight traffic blackspots. In our route: Warrington to Milton Keynes via Daventry, it correctly highlighted the A50 / M6 junction as a congestion area.

They also show were the Travelodges are, but we believe this more to do with an advertising relationship than simply a usefulness one.

One recommendation we have is that they should try and make the locations on the route plan clickable i.e. in this route if they could make "grappenhall" a link to it's location on a map. This would be useful if you're trying to plan a stop there and would like to see where to stay near to the junction / town.

But overall, we're very impressed with the AA Route Planner.

Route Planner Rating: 8/10