Verizon Does AAA

Who doesn't remember a family vacation with the AAA TripTik in hand? We kids would fight over who would get to draw the magic marker "progress line" on the booklet-sized map as we drove the interminable road trip to Florida. TripTik was a real page-turner! We'd take bets on which page of the trip Dad would pull off the road to toss us out of the car.

Now AAA meets modern times with a new service from Verizon called AAA Mobile. With your Verizon cell phone you can access AAA-rated points of interest and get AAA assistance when your car putters out.

In a break with tradition, the service is available to both AAA and non-AAA members. You'll get both visual and audio directions to any U.S. travel destination and pinpoint those AAA points of interest. Naturally you'll also be able to search for 100,000 locations that offer AAA savings. But the big differentiator is AAA's roadside assistance. One button on your phone sends your GPS coordinates to the AAA and connects you with AAA for service.

You'll need to have a GPS-enabled/Get It Now-enabled cell phone. The service is available from Verizon's Get It Now store for $9.99 a month. I'm waiting to verify the fact that each phone needs its own membership and I'll update you. (As a comparison, our current AAA membership is about $50 annually with an extra $25 fee for each extra driver—drivers need to live at the same address or must have their own membership—which in our house amounts to a small fortune.

And if all of this has made you long for TripTik, just visit AAA.com where you can build your own.