A new two-stage heuristic for the recreational vehicle scheduling problem.

•A new mathematical formulation is proposed for solving the recreational vehicle scheduling problem.•A two-stage heuristic is proposed to reduce the solution time further.•The performance is evaluated using the large-sized real-life instances.•The new formulation outperforms existing formulations in the literature.•The two-stage heuristic outperforms the existing heuristic in the literature.