As we travel around the country in our diesel motorhome, we’re always looking for savings on fuel. I’ve used the Gas Buddy app to find stations and their pricing, but it seems I most often gravitate to the highway exit stations like Loves, Flying J, and others because of the convenience being right off the exit ramp and knowing I’ll always have plenty of room to navigate in and around the pump islands.
Although Gas Buddy might show a good price on a station in town, I don’t know how the roads and/or traffic might be getting off the freeway and down to the station, and I have no idea how large the lot is or how many pumps they have. When you’re driving a motorhome pulling a Toad (that means you can’t back up) you want to know you can get in and out easily.
Pilot/Flying J has offered discounts to RV’ers that carry the Good Sam (Camping World) Preferred Customer card. This gives gasoline customers five cents per gallon and diesel customers eight cents per gallon discount. This card works in the RV lanes and not in the truck lanes.
But now we have an even better alternative. A commercial trucking company called TSD Logistics out of Texarkana, Texas is now offering it’s negotiated pricing with some of the more popular truck fuel stops to RV’ers who purchase diesel fuel.
Large trucking companies negotiate fuel prices with suppliers based on annual volume. In order to get the best discount possible, TSD saw that by opening their program to RV’ers their total annual volume would increase thereby getting them a better price in future negotiations.
For the RV’er the process is simple. Go to the TSD site and register for an account. There’s no fee for signing up. Once you receive your TSD / EFS debit card in the mail just pull in to any Loves, Petro, T/A (Truckstops of America) and some others. Pull up to THE TRUCK PUMPS. You’ll use your new TSD / EFS card and follow the prompts on the pump screen. It’ll ask you a few questions and then you’ll be able to use the big-boy hose and fill that big diesel tank much more quickly than at the regular or RV pumps.
The TSD/EFS debit card will be attached to your checking account. I recommend that you set up a new checking account just for this purpose. I use ALLY online bank because it’s an interest bearing account and there’s no cost to set up or maintain the account.
With the ALLY app on my phone I can easily transfer funds from our household account to the ALLY account at any time. The pictures below show the ticket from the Loves station in Bushnell Florida along with the screenshot from the EFS app showing my actual cost and savings.
On our most recent 4000+ mile trip from Arizona through Florida and on up to Ohio, we paid $765 for 391 gallons of diesel fuel and saved $255 off the pump price for an average per gallon price of $1.95 per gallon.
If you’re interested in signing up for the diesel fuel program, check out the web site at https://www.tsdlogistics.com/services/fuel-program/ and if you have any questions about it you can reach out to me in the comment section below or send me an email direct to herbsells@gmail.com
Oh, and by the way … you’ll see on the TSD site that you can get $25 from TSD by referring any of your friends to the program. So if and when you sign up, please indicate that you were referred by Herb Baldwin.
Thanks!
