How to create the ultimate road trip playlist

The first step to any successful road trip is the ideal vehicle. You want to be comfortable and have enough space to store your bags, especially if you’re hitting the road for over 28 days - and that’s where our Flexi hire service comes in! At Intack Self Drive, you can choose your perfect car, van, or even minibus for your trip with no long-term commitments, giving you the ultimate freedom to return it to us whenever it suits you!

The second step to a successful road trip is excellent music. The drive may only be a means of getting you where you need to go, but some of the best memories will be singing along in the car to some of your favourite songs with your friends and family. Much can be said about creating the perfect playlist, especially since music taste is incredibly subjective. Still, if you take into account who you’re with, what they like and where you’re going, you can craft a line-up of songs that are guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser.

We spend our life in and around vehicles, so we’re no strangers to a road trip playlist. So, if you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place!

Choose your musical medium

These days, most people have a subscription to a music streaming platform, whether that's Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, or one of the many others, which makes crafting the ultimate playlist easy. But if you're old school, you might want to go the CD route - and we respect that!

Either way, before you get started, you need to choose your medium, preferably one in which you can either download the playlist or have it ready so you don't get interrupted if you hit a patch of road with little to no internet signal. Then, you can start thinking about the content.

Give yourself plenty of time

Creating anything great rarely happens under pressure, and unless you’re a music guru, you’re going to want to give yourself at least a few days to consider your options. Remember, if you’re driving for hours on end, you’re going to need a pretty impressive line-up. Start by creating a list and adding everything you can think of at the moment, you can even ask the people they’re travelling with for their requests. As the days pass by and your trip gets closer you may start to remember classic bangers that had been long lost to the times or come across some new songs on the radio that would be a perfect fit.

Variety is your best friend

Everyone has their preferred genres that they listen to in their own time, but a little variety never hurt anybody! You can mix the old with the new, giant pop hits, with time honoured classics so your road trip companions never know what's coming next. If you have a song you love to dance to with your friends, a band you all went to see together or even a family favourite that everyone loves to sing along to - whack that in there for good measure.

The longer the better

You don't want your road trip playlist to start and end exactly as your planned drive is to begin and end; what if you get stuck in an unforeseen 2 hours of traffic and then you're stuck listening to the same songs on repeat? Plus, you want to allow yourself the wiggle room to skip over the songs that maybe sounded like a great idea at the time, but maybe don't match the vibe of the mood on the day - there's plenty of reasons. Giving yourself a couple of hours of leeway means you'll have more than enough music to go around and keep you bopping until you reach your destination.

Some honourable mentions from our team at Intack Self Drive

It’d be rude of us to not offer you some inspiration after all this, so here are a couple song that without a doubt with be on our road trip playlist this summer:

• Fleetwood Mac - Dreams
• Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
• Modjo - Lady
• Tears For fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World
• The Human League - Don’t You Want Me
• Depeche Mode - Just Can’t Get Enough
• The Cure - Just Like Heaven
• Earth, Wind & Fire - Boogie Wonderland
• Jungle - Busy Earnin’
• Charles & Eddie - Would I Lie To You?
• Oasis - She’s Electric
• Daft Punk - One More Time
• M83 - Midnight City
• MGMT - Electric Feel

Those are just some of our suggestions. Feel free to add and subtract as you please when you start creating your ultimate road trip playlist! With the music all sorted, let’s talk transport—we’ve got over 50 years of unrivalled van, car, and minibus hire experience under our belt here at Intack, and we’re always here to help!

We offer fantastic deals on both daily hire and Flexi hire services so, if you’re ready to get started, you can browse the best van hire deals right here on our site or give us a call at 01254 57811!