Planning a trip in the near future? Not sure which route to take to best plan your trip? 

AA route finder is one of UK's best route planners that you will ever come across. Its interactive interface will help you find not only the shortest route, but also the fastest route, which is not necessarily the shortest one.

How to use AA Route Finder

All you need to do is to type in the departure and the destination points at the top left corner of the website. You are given an option of adding a "via" point, where you would like to stop by during the trip. You will also have a route option, where you can choose to avoid motorways or tolls/congestion charging. Once you have specified all the details of your trip, just click on "Get Route," and it will compute the best route for you within a second or two.

AA route finder covers Great Britain, Ireland, and the rest of the Europe. You can easily print the route information, and when you do this, make sure to open up the print-friendly version of the page by clicking on the little printer sign on the left.

One of the best features that I like the most about AA route finder is the ability to locate hotels or restaurants at any given point of your route. With other route planners that I have used, it was not as easy to find a restaurant at a specific point during the trip - it was quite annoying to zoom into the area first and search for a restaurant. Some times you will loose the route information when you search for a local information such as restaurants or hotels nearby. With AA route finder, all you need to do is just hover your mouse over to the location where you would like to perform the search, and the hotel or restaurant search option will pop up, which will display the information directly on the map.

I much prefer the AA route finder over any other route planners that exist, and I believe you will find the same, once you start using it.

Why would anyone use AA Route Finder over a Google Maps?

You may have already noticed that AA Route Finder also uses Google Maps as their mapping display solution. Some people also complain that the loading speed of the AA Route planner is significantly slower than the one of Google Maps'.  However, there are still unique and distinct advantages that you will find about AA Route Planner.

One of AA's unique features is the parking spotting feature. While you are browsing through your direction results, simply zoom into the area you are interested in and enable the parking option by clicking on the parking button found at the top of the map screen. AA Route Finder is integrated with Parkopedia and finds some of these identified parking spots for you.

Right next to the parking button, there also are traffic alert and traffic speed options. Go ahead and check off these options, and the known traffic information will be updated right on the map for you to best plan out the trip according to the road conditions.

Some people find this somewhat annoying, but sometimes I find the hotel ads at the bottom of the page useful. If you are planning a road trip and also looking for a place to stay, you can catch two birds with one stone, possibly saving you time and providing the convenience.

Lastly, one of the local advantages that AA Route Finder has over Google Maps is the traffic news feed. This is found on the second tab on the left side of the side, right above the "From" text box. You can specify the location that you would like to look up for the traffic information, and the traffic situation will be updated on the map directly. They also provide the 24-hour traffic news service via phone, you can simply call 84322(theAA) from any regular phones to get the latest updates on the road situations.