Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) are large complex networks consisting of vehicles with high speeds and highly dynamic network structure. Multi-hop routing in VANETs is one of the important issues due to frequent topology changes and high mobility of network nodes. Most of the current routing protocols propose broadcast based hop selection for packet transfer where requests are broadcasted until the destination is found in the network. Due to this issue, the channel availability reduces and network congestion and packet delay increases. This paper proposes a reception based node selection (RBNS) technique without broadcasting the request messages to discover the destination node. Neighbouring vehicles keep records of their packet reception rate for nodes within their transmission range and the vehicle with highest reception rate is selected as forwarding hop and assigned as the source in the subsequent region to prevent vehicles from the previous transmission regions from broadcasting the request messages. The algorithm performed best in terms of throughput, packet drop and collision when compared to other algorithm from the literature.